root salad False Lights

It’s Jim Moray & Sam Carter’s electric adventure. Simon Jones hears the story so far.

“W

e play folk music, loud electric folk music.” Quite a slogan. It’s a fine summer morning,

and Jim Moray and Sam Carter are consid- ering the genesis of their fusion folk cre- ation False Lights.

What went wrong with the old model?

“I guess that the fact that it became a ‘process’ is what began to make it seem more formulaic. What we’re doing is not new, but it is starting from the first princi- ples rather than building on where other folk-rock bands left off. We were actually strongly advised never to use that phrase, but… who are we kidding? It’s not a revolu- tionary new idea to play trad songs in this way, and we’d look stupid if we pretended that it’d never been done before,” Jim Moray muses.

“We’re more interested in making a great show that can headline festivals and give people their money’s worth – we don’t want to alienate anyone with terminology, because we want to have something for everyone!” Sam chips in.

“Sam just wanted to play electric guitar more, I was thinking about it on a practical level: what do stadium-sized groups do to entertain festival-headline crowds? Can we borrow from that? We both grew up on ’90s rock – Radiohead, Nirvana, Blur – so the answer seemed to be to make an electric band that played traditional music and wrapped it in the presentation of an experi- mental (but still mainstream) guitar band. We agreed that that was what the folk uni- verse was missing,” Mr Moray expands.

Though the idea had surfaced in con- versation at the first English Folk Expo, by last summer and despite complicated solo schedules, they had a band ready to head- line Folk East. Choice musicians too.

“In terms of the musicians, I guess what we’ve ended up with is a … I hate the term ‘supergroup’, but everybody is a really good musician. I just feel ridiculously lucky every time we play,” Sam smirks.

You can see his point. Jim gets quite animated. “It was like being a teenager forming bands again – trying to get the right set of friends to be a gang who play music and hang out. Sam Nadel (drums) and Nick Cooke (melodeon) are people we’d worked with before. Tom Moore (violin) is an incredible player who I knew would add to the mix. And Jon Thorne and now Barna- by Stradling are both bass players who could be really solid and give authority to the sound.”

With their name lifted from The Wreck-

ers, a novel by Bella Bathurst, and a fire- works-and-lightning album Salvor in the can, they’ve garnered nothing but praise, hope and expectation.

“Sam and I went away to a log cabin to get started on the material. We’d brought a few songs with us, but Polly On The Shore was the first proper collaboration and has slowly crept up as everyone’s favourite – it’s had radio success too, and it’s the one I lis- ten to and think we raised the bar a bit. The Wife Of Usher’s Well is another favourite, because of Sam’s inspired pairing of words and tune and my Timbaland beat and frag- ment of Purcell,” explains JM.

“It was probably nine months from the first idea to walking on stage at Folk East for the first time. And then another six to the album being released. So it’s been rapid, but pretty steady. In lots of ways having something to aim for sharpened everything up a little,” Sam says.

So far they’ve toured cannily and indeed headlined selected festivals across the summer. There’s a tight single edit of Polly that should be echoing around your domicile, as indeed should the loose, good- spirited, rousing sound that is Salvor.

“We always had ‘live’ in mind. That was the big thing with this band, we wanted it to really work live and give a great experi- ence. I think the songs have translated real- ly well. That’s still developing though. On the first night of the tour we were worried that it was going to be too loud and weird. I

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said that to somebody in the crowd and they said ‘No, we want it louder and weird- er!’ We are doing something where’s there’s enough recognisable stuff and landmarks in the sounds that people know, and then adding something that is hopefully new and interesting,” Sam considers.

H

ip, smart and savvy, False Lights are all over social media, using it to heighten awareness and their profile. There’s even a down- load-only live set. Jim confirms, “Yes, it came out as a bonus with the album on Bandcamp. It’s now available separately, because we’re aware that having been given headline slots very quickly we feel we needed to show people what they’d be getting if they came to see us.”

We fall again to speculation about the mistakes of yesteryear and how they were repeated until the endemic rock quest proved its own undoing.

“I’d like to add that there’s been 46 years more evolution of rock music and stu- dio techniques to bring to the table than Fairport had in 1969 – the whole field of electronic music, hip hop, rare grooves, you name it. There’s so much more you can use as building blocks now.”

Sam sums up the manifesto. “This band is about being a gang playing together for real because that’s the sort of live show we wanted to put on. To be exciting with some pieces of wood with strings attached.”

www.falselights.co.uk falselights.bandcamp.com/album/live- at-folk-east F

Photo: Rob Bridge