f48 North Eastern Air
Never try to second guess those Unthanks: their latest album reaches into unexplored territories. Colin Irwin hears how tradition meets Miles…
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xpect the unexpected. Ever since they first stepped blinking into the spotlight with the Cruel Sis- ter album a decade ago, Team Unthank have never knowingly
trodden a tried or trusted path. Musically, promotionally and philosophically, they’ve steadfastly pursued their own sometimes seemingly wayward path, placing absolute trust in their own instincts and the music of their hearts to carry the day.
They are wholly of the British folk world. And thus they remain. And yet, their current position of eminence has been gleaned from far beyond the conventional folk fraternity, a devoted audience captured not by any measure of compromise, glitz or gimmick but by emphasising ever more deeply their natural instincts towards music, culture, tradition and heritage. They’ve fre- quently stepped a long way across the imaginary lines we often create to define music, without it sounding remotely unnat- ural or alien to their roots or with any trace of self-consciousness. The word is trust. Trust predominantly in the songs they inter- pret and perform. But trust also in them- selves to deliver and trust in audiences to accept, follow and be moved.
This has never been more convincingly illustrated than on their new album Mount The Air, which begins with a hugely ambi- tious, grandly atmospheric ten-minute title track with a beauteous trumpet part that evokes the name of Miles Davis. It’s not the normal marketing wisdom for a band who’ve achieved crossover status, while still drawing inspiration and sustenance from the informal pub sessions where they cut their teeth.
Mount The Air started life as a four-line ditty randomly discovered by Becky Unthank in a book of Dorset traditional songs at Cecil Sharp House and was developed largely by Unthanks’ keyboard player / arranger / pro- ducer / composer / manager Adrian McNally. A risky launchpad, you may think, for the band’s first studio album in four years, but the Unthanks didn’t get where they are today on bland caution and McNally is quite proud he managed to strip it back from its original seventeen minutes.
“It started out as a one-verse song but as I started playing with it, it morphed into something else and I quickly became obsessed with it. Becky wrote words to the end section and that’s when my love of Sketches Of Spain and Miles Davis surfaced.
I didn’t expect that to happen in support of a traditional Dorset song but it just felt right and became this extended opening to the record, an expression of my love for the tune born out of that traditional song.”
Finding someone to play trumpet à la Miles proved somewhat problematic, but they eventually discovered former Elysian Quartet collaborator Tom Arthurs who, it turned out, lived in Germany, working on the Berlin improv scene. McNally managed to catch him on a flying visit to Edinburgh, hiring a studio near the airport to record his part on the track… the only thing on the album recorded outside the makeshift little studio 200 yards from where Rachel and Adrian live in Northumberland.
It’s been an eventful four years since the last Unthanks studio album, Last. Rachel and Adrian have had two children, Becky got married and they’ve been active musi- cally. In 2012 they released three live albums under the banner Diversions, drawn from three very different themed shows on the songs of Robert Wyatt and Antony & The Johnsons, concerts with the Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band and the soundtrack to a documentary about the history of the Tyne- side shipbuilding industry.
They’ve also been involved in a Great
War project with Sam Lee, played shows with Voice Squad and Martin Hayes, collab- orated with Orbital, Adrian Utley of Por- tishead, The Moulettes and German com- poser Werner Cee, run regular Singing Weekends, while Becky collaborated with Martin Green and Inge Thomson on the wonderful Crows Bones album.
“After the three Diversions albums we thought we’d better go away for a while before folk got sick of us,” says McNally. “We never intended to take so long to make it but the album became something bigger than we’d originally planned and took on its own entity. It took some wrestling to the ground…”
McNally burned a great deal of mid- night oil grappling with the album – some- thing of a novelty given the previous tight deadlines surrounding the recording and mixing process – though it invariably meant hours of experimenting with different ideas before resolving the best way of doing things was the one they’d thought of first.
The results are spectacular. “The title track is extremely ambitious,” agrees McNally. “It takes us into new musical terri- tory and a level of noise we haven’t had
before, which is very satisfying. On the Last album tour we had ten musicians on stage but we never really made a din or used that power. We’ve been known for understated- ness and restraint, but restraint is only evi- dent when you break it now and again and show you don’t need it all the time.”
The symphonic qualities sometimes make it feel like there’s a full orchestra crammed in that little studio and McNally admits to fears of the album sounding overly grandiose and pretentious and actively tried to strip back a couple of the bigger tracks, like The Foundling and Lullaby.
“It does sound colossal in places but it’s in the music rather than the actual scale. The strings are never more than a quartet and there are never more than two brass parts and there’s no doubling up or multi- layering. I tried to strip it back but it’s not in the production. It’s in the momentum of the music or the power of the story, it’s not something that’s manufactured.”
or the first time, the new album has writing credits for all five members of The Unthanks, some- what contradicting the oft-held perception of Adrian McNally as not just pianist, studio mastermind and business force of the band, but some sort of ego-driven Svengali or dictator.
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“That’s more of an insult to Rachel and Becky than to me. It comes out of a patriar- chal point of view that two young women couldn’t possibly know what they’re doing and it must be the guy at the back that’s using them for his means and is the clever one. It’s an insult because they are both extremely strong-minded and their intuition about music – and about people – is much better than mine. They present themselves in a well-mannered, polite and light way but they are actually very serious and very private people and that’s why people maybe imagine they aren’t a driving force. But I don’t get anything past them that doesn’t meet their approval and that happens all the time. I am frequently knocked back.”
“Because of the nature of recording and geography I am in control 99 percent on a practical level in the studio but there’s nothing in that which should imply my autonomy is absolute. I am just trusted and at the end of the day the name on the cover is theirs, the picture on the cover is theirs and everything is in their name so they have to be completely happy with it. And if they’re not, they let me know!”
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