f26 Transcendental Folkation

Telling The Bees propel Andy Letcher’s clever songs and tunes on swirling flights of English instrumental brilliance. Elizabeth Kinder gets the hive news. Photos by Judith Burrows.

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ometimes an album pops up that makes you question things you take for granted. Like your long- held belief in your own musical tastes. It transports you in a

moment to somewhere unexpected, to a place where you’re easily, suddenly, won- derfully lost. Steer By The Stars plunged me into psych-folk waters that I’d never want- ed to explore, but handily the luscious title track on Telling The Bees’ latest release at least suggested a means of navigation. And then I found that, like a modern-day min- strel, singer Andy Letcher leads you with lovely melodies through a richly textured harmonic tapestry of swirling, beautifully warped, evocative instrumental lines (and occasional sweet backing vocals) that bring the stories he sings vividly to life.

And I found that wherever this music takes you there is an inescapable sense of Englishness. It’s not just down to Letcher’s voice or phrasing, the instrumentation or the band’s fine arrangements. Nor is it down to his taking up the baton of the bardic tra- dition and dancing off into the sunset with it. It’s something extra-musical that’s con- veyed in the sound and creates a sense of being taken to a weird and wonderful, twisted English Arcadia, a place where the carnival is always passing through – and freedom and magic are found.

It’s the result of the combined creativity of the band whose members – Andy Letcher (vocals, mandolin, English bagpipes, stomp box, percussion, samples), Jane Griffiths (fiddle, viola, harmonium, backing vocals), Colin Fletcher (electric bass, double bass, guitars, euphonium, WEM Copicat), Josie Webber (cello, electric piano, backing vocals) and Jim Penny (Anglo concertina, saxophone) – are witty, intelligent free thinkers who don’t automatically take the received wisdom generally sucked up through the establishment drip-feed, but question it instead. In expressing their expe- riences creatively through music, refreshing ways of thinking might be conveyed through a means that might speak to us all.

To be honest I was unnerved at the prospect of meeting them. Having learnt that Letcher and Swampy had been close neighbours in Newbury, a worry crept in of being holed up with a holier-than-thou shower-shy-outfit washed up from the late ‘80s anti-Thatcher rave culture, banging on about ‘when it boils down to it the Earth

and all nature offers us can in fact be expressed through a solid four-to-the-floor and gong samples’.

Not that Telling the Bees go in for gong samples. Anyway, it couldn’t have been more different. This band don’t just make music that’s complex yet simple and some- times sublime, they are brilliant company. And quite frankly I haven’t had such a good laugh in ages.

My friend Wendie and I pitched up at Priddy Folk Festival where the Bees were performing, to talk first to Letcher (who looked well-scrubbed, dapper and thought- fully manicured) in the bright and airy Artists’ tent. After a brief preamble involv- ing places we’d lived…

Letcher: “Then I was in Newbury,” Wendie: “I was in Newbury too.” Letcher: “Really? In ‘96?” Wendie “Yes.”

EK: “You lived in a house Wendie. Andy lived up a tree. Let’s move on.” Letcher: Are you a double act?

But we’d come swiftly to the heart of the matter – the place where identity, poli- tics, drugs and creativity coincide and the place from which the Bees’ three albums to date, Untie The Wind (2008), An English Arcanum (2010) and Steer By The Stars (2015) all spring.

Tree dwelling is not the first thing that comes to mind when you’re considering comfort and easy living. You can’t simply stroll through your front door: you have to prusik up (climb up a rope utilising a particu- lar knot) and abseil down. Your house is bits of wood and a tarpaulin and dinner is from (squirrel-proof) tins. It is not the ideal choice if you suffer, as Letcher does, from vertigo. But in the woods outside Newbury, this was what he thought of as home during the harsh winter–late spring of ‘95/’96. Evenings were spent around the fire, jamming, singing protest songs and days “wandering around playing the bagpipes badly and the mandolin, badly, but doing kind of rabble- rousing songs, using music as a protest.”

It’s a way of living that requires dedica- tion and motivation.

Letcher’s came from his disaffection with his public school background (Marlbor- ough) which led him to Sheffield University and a science degree in ecology, and onto Merton College, Oxford, where he gained a