Jack Hayter - Abbey Wood (Gare Du Nord)

 

 

The title of Jack Hayter's wonderful new album comes from the road in which he lived four years ago but the symbol that lies at the heart of the album's first track 'The Mulberry Tree at Abbey Wood' - which I played in my Dandelion Radio show last month - is loaded with far great depth

 

In particular the tree - 'you know the one, there's only one' as its lyrics tell us - stand as a metaphor that's explored throughout the collection.  It's a collection that's rich with feelings of solitude, yet it's a resilient solitude, loaded with a defiant spirit that manages to survive despite hostile surroundings.

 

On the surface, it's an album about places, but really it's about the people who give those places their character, characters like 'Fanny On The Hill', who serves up a liquid dinner with 'whisky for pudding'

 

Or the narrator of 'I Sent My Love To Bendigo', who fights his war in the farmyard, in attempt to stop the army from taking his beloved horse to war.  His brother goes to war in order to end the fighting with his girlfriend over the issue, only to return, broken, to hang himself at Christmas.  Under its original title of 'Horsemeat For Dogs', we featured an early version of the track on an Unwashed Territories compilation.  Its redolence has not diminished in the year since.

 

Similarly 'The Arandora Star', the tale of the ship loaded with British-based Italian and German civilians that was sunk during World War II, offers much poignancy against a backdrop of the sad xenophobia of these times.    As with Woody Guthrie's 'Deportees', the power lies in the evocation of individual lives behind the tragedy - the Italian women who'd helped to build bombers in north Manchester among them - leaving again a sense of real people devoured by circumstances they had no role in instigating.   I'm playing the track in my show this month.

 

it's a powerful collection, but it's also infused with a gentle, kind spirit.  A celebration of people and places, no less who, like the Mulberry Tree, still stand defiant despite it all.  Among them, unquestionably, stands Hayter himself.

 

Get it at https://jackhayter.bandcamp.com/album/abbey-wood

Chuck - My Band Is A Computer (Old Money/Audio Antihero)

The perennially wonderful Audio Antihero have introduced a new off-shoot label.  It's called Old Money Records and if what it's going to release is anywhere near as good as this first offering, we're in for a treat.

Old Money's remit is to put out reissues and compilations, with the intention of allowing us to catch up with music from the past that hasn't yet received the attention it deserves.  As someone who constantly self-flagellates due to an inability to give everything that passes through my inbox as much of a hearing as I'd like, this is a pleasing venture in itself.

I don't think anything from Chuck ever did pass through that inbox, which is a shame because I've clearly been missing out on something very special indeed.  Chuck's approach is unmistakeably rooted in that tradition of eastern US songwriters - he's from Massachusetts but now lives in Brooklyn - who have a way of mixing the celebratory and the world-weary in such a way that any dormant paradoxes lying therein are brought kicking and screaming, yet often laughing, into the world.

I detect strains of Jeffrey Lewis and Leonard Cohen but I note neither of those are mentioned as influences in the press release.  Daniel Johnston and

Jonathan Richman are though, and these are just as discernible. Other ears may no doubt find that Chuck is coming from somewhere else entirely, because what he adds to all this is very much his own.  The defiantly bombastic synth-led overture of opener 'Happy New Years Babe' make way for the wistfully introspective 'Oceans' and 'Mary Anne' yet the mesmerising, uplifting musical backdrop, particularly of the latter, continues the defiant mood, which prevails, even as the awkward tiny details of life so brilliantly assemble in Chuck's acute lyrical observations, throughout the collection.

I'm playing 'Pictures' in my Dandelion Radio show this month, another track that marries upbeat instrumentation with reflective lyrics, in this case searching for clues in a personal history that, for Chuck, comes across as somehow both familiar and alien. 

In all, then, a new direction for Audio Antihero, but with a familiar stamp of quality. 'My Band Is A Computer' is available now, as download or limited edition cassette, here. 

The Fascinating World of Mark Wynn

There's always been room in my life for an acerbic singer songwriter with an ear for a great tune and a penchant for a well-time lyrical sideswipe at anyone who crosses his field of vision. I could trace a lineage through Billy Bragg, Andy White all the way through to Chris T-T and still have plenty of gaps to fill in at the end.

Thing is, though, for someone in this field to stand out you can't be too much like anyone else, which is what makes it such a tough thing to do.  The restrictions you have to work with him - often just you and a guitar - make this the musical form that's most comparable to the sonnet.  It's like someone else made the rules and you've got to work within them but still find enough space to do your own thing, say something at least occasionally remarkable and sound like no one else.

That's why anyone who emerges from the pack deserves to be celebrated.  Step forward Mark Wynn, York-based troubadour and someone who can more than hold his own in the illustrious company mentioned above. Great thing is he's got something to say and he says it a lot.  His fascinating back catalogue already four cracking releases he put out via his bandcamp site last year and the three he's racked up this year already.

I'd already decided to play something from his Social Situations album - also released as a split vinyl LP with The Sorry Kisses - in my June show on Dandelion Radio because, frankly, it's among the half dozen best releases of the year so far, when Mark directed my attention to the album he put out in January, which more than holds its own under the potentially burdensome title of Eggs, Kes and that bike I never bought you even though that I would like to.  Then, literally as I was preparing the show, out came a new EP, The Polar Bear Blah EP.

I promise I'll try to play something from the EP in the coming months, but at the moment I'm loving Social Situations so much it's hard to find room for anything else.  'Cat Smack Baby' is every bit as good as its title suggests, while 'Halloween Song' offers a whole new take on the vampire/zombie love fetish so beloved of cinema.  'I Am John 2' is as good an example of the kind of stream of consciousness masterpiece that Wynn specialises in as anything you'll hear.  I'm keeping back 'Football Love Song' for a 2014 World Cup special show I've got planned because so many people tell me they enjoyed the one I did in 2010 (thanks) and have gone for the wonderful 'Bukoswki', a song that crams about five minutes' worth of great material into two, to play in my show in June.

Of all the potential comparisons, perhaps the nearest and most appropriate is with the demiurge-like genius of Jeffrey Lewis.  Rare praise indeed, but then Mark Wynn is a very rare artist and any praise that comes his way is well-aimed.

Get Social Situations here 
And get The Polar Bear Blah EP here
And, while you're at it, get Eggs, Kes... here