root salad Furrow Collective
Emily Portman, Lucy Farrell, Rachel Newton & Alasdair Roberts. Tim Chipping collars the quartet of the moment.
T
here’s a moment on At Our Next Meeting, the first album by The Furrow Collective, where two ballads meet. As Handsome Molly briefly interlaces its sea-cold fingers with Our Captain Calls, the abandonment felt by both narrators seems quite real. In that moment all the years and versions these traditional standards have seen fall away. Sometimes all it takes to make an old song relevant is to sing it.
Emily Portman, Lucy Farrell and Rachel Newton will be familiar to anyone who’s seen The Emily Portman Trio perform her twisted fairy tales – Angela Carter-inspired accounts of swan impregnation, selkies and human pie fillings. Alasdair Roberts will be familiar to anyone as he’s Alasdair Roberts. He just is.
But The Furrow Collective is more than The Emily Portman Trio plus a man.
“There is an element of that,” admits Rachel. “But the stuff we do with Emily is largely her own songwriting. And we arrange it together. Emily’s very generous – it’s not like we were saying, ‘Right, we want to do the songs now.’ We wanted something that was equal in the sense that we all brought something.”
“Alasdair has been working with the
Trio ever since he and Emily recorded on each other’s albums. We just thought he’d be great and it’s not like he’s busy! Actual- ly he’s probably formed three new bands and gone on tour this morning.”
Although Emily, Lucy and Rachel have performed together since they met some ten years ago on the Newcastle Folk Degree, Alasdair found it easy to enter the fold.
“It felt as natural as breathing,” he marvels. “It just seemed to happen natu- rally and I was quite surprised by that. I don’t know why I was surprised. They’re all fantastic musicians and it was a great hon- our to be in this group with them.”
Not that anyone was in the group for long. After three days of rehearsal the album was recorded in less than a week.
“I don’t like practicing much so it was good for me,” Lucy laughs. “We recorded quickly and if things weren’t working we just ditched them. There were a few we worked on for longer. But everyone just had the same idea of what should happen with each song.”
That sympathy is at the heart of the
group’s treatment of Handsome Molly and Our Captain Calls.
“That’s been in mine and Emily’s joint repertoire for a long time,” says Lucy. “I’d heard Cath and Phil Tyler doing Handsome Molly and sang it to Emily. And she sang me Our Captain Calls and we began talk-
ing about how they’re the same story from a different perspective.”
For a long time neither could sing them without crying.
L
“It’s hard,” insists Emily. “They’re incredibly sad songs. The subject matter of being abandoned by your lover… Our Captain Calls has a particular soft spot because it’s what got me into this music in the first place. I’d never heard Pop May- nard before. And that was the first archive recording I’d heard. I was intrigued and fascinated and I fell in love with it.”
ucy’s emotional attachment is more dramatic. “I’d gone to a Jeffrey Lewis gig and Cath and Phil were the support. They sang Handsome
Molly and I got so sad I had to leave. So for about a year we couldn’t deal with it. It’s quite embarrassing crying on stage.”
Rachel Newton, known too as harpist with The Shee, also brought songs she felt a personal attachment to.
“Skippin’ Barfit Through
The Heather is one of my favourite melodies. I first heard it sung by Alison McMorland but it’s not an unusual song, certainly in Scotland. And that made me think, ‘should I do it?’ I grew up singing Gaelic songs and it took quite a long time to fig- ure out my Scots singing voice. Working with Emily and Lucy was a big help to know I could just sing in my own voice.”
We keep coming back to that same idea. These songs are renewed when they’re sung in your own voice and when they matter to you.
“Johnny My Man is a temperance song from the mid-19th Century that I learned from a singer called Norman Kennedy,” says Alas- dair. “That song, you always bring something of your own experience. You imagine someone you know being in a similar circumstance.”
For an album made so
speedily, At Our Next Meet- ing has had a powerful effect on those who’ve heard it. The sparse, partly improvised arrangements and unaffect- ed vocals feel like the result of fresh thinking about tradi- tional music. Something new is happening.
“I think there is something,” Emily agrees. “There’s definitely an unspoken approach that we all take and that links us together. And I think it’s a feeling that you don’t need to overstate these bal- lads. They can speak for themselves. That’s a big thing.”
My only niggle is the name. Furrow is a fantastic word (also Emily’s record label) but Collective isn’t something you could write on a pencil case.
“I can’t remember the other sugges- tions,” says Lucy. “I think there was The Furrow Four.”
“We thought maybe we should change it but no one could think of any- thing,” adds Emily. “It’s certainly better than all four of our names because we’d sound like a strange firm of accountants.”
Portman, Farrell, Newton and Roberts – specialists in loss.
www.thefurrowcollective.co.uk F 17 f
Photo: Chris Saunders
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