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oh dear this sounds exactly like the sort of music I promised myself I'd stop making - oh well, I made it via a different route and so it doesn't feel like I'm cheating myself - and anyway I really like this, and can there be a better reason? - glooped keys buried under reverb to form a blurred pendulum of surrender
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yesterday evening after finishing my previous album (so far zero downloads, zero plays, and minus two followers since it came out) I strode on over to Turner Sims to see Sam Lee. Folk music. Half-empty hall but not too embarrassed for him. Drummer in pyjamas, violinist in green ditto, double-bass-er in modern demobbery, pianist dressed like he's auditioning for the reincarnation of Supertramp, Sam himself a little too unfit and old to be wearing clothing as tight as that.
I enjoyed it despite finding the music dreadfully bland - that's probably a me-thing, not a him-thing - and I think Sam felt the same way - after the first song he pulled up a chair and sat down for most of the rest of the gig, fiddling with some old bellows-thing that looked like an old bible. More than 50% of the gig was him talking. That's not as awful as it sounds - well of course it's exactly as awful as it sounds - how could it be any other way? - but fortunately he didn't crack too many muso-jokes.
He doesn't really have the personality to be a good talker. But then he's not a great musician either. A good traddy folk voice - to me sounding exactly like Bert Jansch. To be fair, this morning I searched Bandcamp and heard a few snatches of his albums and on "disc" he's better than he is live.
However I'm being overly negative. And I don't get the impression that when he releases a new album it gets zero plays zero downloads and he loses half his followers overnight. And he was quite interesting about his activism and saving trees and birds and quite frankly I think we are on the same page - there might be something(s) out there worth saving.
Doing so much walking around the country over the decades I have often wondered where/what "England" is .... although I'm never too sure what I'm wondering - am I looking to turn a corner in the pathway and find ahead of me an exact view of Constable's Haywain from 200 years ago, fields being ploughed using horses, as peasants sing the folk songs that Sam sings ? - I don't know what I mean.
For yonks I used to work in the only shop in a New Forest village, one of those shops that sold (it's gone now) a bit of everything, including tat for the August tourists - and I'd stand there behind the counter on hot Sunday afternoons as these miserable people came in and mooched around and walked away and the lanes were blocked with nose-to-arse 3mph cars all hoping to suddenly break free and turn that magical corner and find the England of their childhood storybooks - and I knew even then how impossible it all was - and maybe that's part of why I've never much liked folk music.
Of course England is now too controlled and repressed and every square inch is regulated and trampled and barely anywhere in the south is without traffic noise and the most "remote" paths are always ten minutes' wait away from the next phone-guided bright cheerful walkers out after their nice middle class luncheon party - and gaggles of cyclists doing the only thing they can do with their ten-grand bikes and two-grand gadgets/clobber, riding in big byway circles just in order to give themselves something to talk about.... oh god possibly no different from me, except I'm cheap and scruffy and often lost down the illegible crease of an old charity-shop map. And genuinely, I do believe I'm doing it because I love it and need it.
No I don't know where the folky "England" is nowadays - but I often feel closer to it in e.g. this scruffy city than I do in the smart waymarked countryside. Last night the audience looked not very folky really - we all looked like a turnout for a protest meeting about HS2 or something. Only two people looked real - one woman in a terrible bright orange DIY cardigan thingy, and a bloke in a filthy holey thick jumper, and I'm sad to confess that I was neither of them.
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(A FEW MINS AFTER PUBLISHING THIS ALBUM/BLURB - ooops, I realise that one of the reasons that my previous album, which I thought I'd zapped out yesterday evening, did so badly was because it was stilll languishing in the "drafts" thingy till now - it's the one called "Small Down" ..... actually, I think you were right not to play it or I was right not to release it or something - sometimes the subconscious does the best thing. And while I'm chattering randomly, belated Happy Birthday to Skull Face, another October baby like myself, it's a great month isn't it. Ah they all are)
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(recorded today, photo Sam Lee at the Turner Sims last night)
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it sounds like those early Selbstportrait albums that Roedelius did a million years ago that have been my favourite albums for all of my life katharine eastman
The latest from Grails is full of woozy, expansive music that draws on a host of sources to create immersive compositions. Bandcamp New & Notable Dec 5, 2016
