f44 Temple Creatures


One of the year’s best albums is a weird work of natural improvisation on traditional songs. Jeanette Leech talks to the makers, Rapunzel & Sedayne.


by his grandfather. He was keen to learn it. “I hoped to join this recorder class,” Sean says. “They laughed me out of it. They said, ‘that’s not even a proper musical instru- ment you have!’ And I thought, ‘But this is my little flute!’ Even though it only played about three notes. And that little flute has been the cornerstone of an obsession with experimental music, and music from differ- ent parts of the world.”


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Today, listening to the music of Rapunzel & Sedayne – Sean and Rachel McCarron – the spirit of that little flute is still there. The simplicity is in the duo’s hand-stitched care; the wide-eyed possibil- ity in their improvisational, spontaneous approach; and the cross-cultural sound in their smorgasbord of musical instruments, unusual enough to still get one chucked out of a staid music group.


hen he was a young boy, Sean Breadin (aka Sedayne) was thrilled with his first instrument, a little Yugosla- vian flute, bought for him


Sean grew up in a Tyneside mining


community, and links the music of his youth – avant-garde rock and punk, as well as the area’s traditional song – with that environment. “All that landscape has vanished, all those collieries are gone,” he says. “Yet it exists as a sort of dream facto- ry. The Colliers Rant was a song I used to hear my grandfather singing. But my grandfather was invalided out of the pits at the age of 12. It makes you think; folk music should not be about glorifying the past.” Sean’s community was also involved with Northumbrian bagpipe dynasties like the Clough family. “On one hand you’ve got more of the traditional side, but you’ve also got all this wonderful new stuff coming through the ether,” he says. “The one thing enhances the other.”


When he started making music him- self, Sean states it was “pretty weird.” An early release for him was the 1988 dark neo-folk album Masstishaddhu / Shek- inah, released on Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound)’s United Dairies label. “It


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consists, in effect, of two backing tracks Mike Watson and I recorded for ballad singing, but we ran out of time and money at the studio so they remained essentially instrumental.” Sean was experimenting with field recordings around this time too. “You’re aware that, in listening to field recordings, specifical- ly music, then you’re not listening to product, you’re listening to document,” he says. “And that’s an important distinc- tion for me.” He was a regular at folk clubs and events in his local area. And it was in the early 1990s, at Durham City Folk Club (then held at The Colpitts pub), where he met Rachel McCarron.


achel was brought up in Fleet- wood, Lancashire. Her father was involved with the Fylde Festival, and as a young girl she witnessed triumphant perfor- mances from the likes of Peter Bellamy and Debby McClatchy. This fed into her young imagina tion and, just as Sean had cross-referenced folk with other music, she too partnered tradition with a love of maverick pop. Rachel had been learning piano from the age of six, had a feel for harmony singing, played guitar and wrote songs as a teenager. She went to Durham to study theology and, while living there, pitched up at The Colpitts.


“She sang this song which she had written, which ends with the lines ‘my name is Rapunzel, call me Rapunzel’.” Sean says. So Sean, and the other members of the club, did just that (“It’s got nothing to do with hair,” he laughs). Sean and Rachel became good friends, singing together in that tiny room, warmed by a roaring open fire and cheap beer; then they fell in love. “Rachel and I came together, as a couple as well as musically, through the environment, the love of the context of the music, as well as the music itself,” Sean says. “That’s the thing about folk for me. It’s always been defined by the context, it’s a very vivid thing.”


For a time, Rachel and Sean were sep- arated by distance if not spirit. “We had this incredible romance where she was living as part of a lay community in a monastic order at Worth Abbey, and I was living in a room in Brancepeth Castle with various medieval musicians,” he said. The pair got together whenever they could and, at Christmas, when Sean visited Worth Abbey, they sang endlessly, both in the Abbey and while wandering along country lanes. Rachel’s voice – crystalline, pure – interplayed with Sean’s more anguished tones.


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