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psy-trance event, chances are you won’t see people jamming round a fire. You will at Glastonbury, You will here at Priddy, there’ll be jams going on that may get there.”
If aiming for transcendence is something that folk music shies away from, then the rest of Telling The Bees are not paying attention.
“We go round and round a song that
Andy’s written and then we listen and someone will do something that sounds exciting and we think ‘how can we enhance that, support it, give it some top end, or some rhythm?’” says Webber. “It’s exciting when someone’s inspired, when they don’t realise. Sometimes we’re playing and noth- ing’s really happening, but then if some- one’s not really concentrating or we’re just jamming that’s the exciting moment when things happen. It can start from a mistake, when an exciting idea happens.” And she adds “I hate playing on my own, I find it really boring. When I hear these guys, hear what they’re doing, and the connection between what each of us is doing is really exciting, that’s when it all fires off.”
Penny says: “For me, playing with a band, in some ways the most important thing about it is reaching a particular state, a state of mind, if there’s an ambition for something, it’s ambition to experience a quality of playing together and being lis- tened to, that’s got a spark to it.”
Webber adds: “One of our favourite gigs was at the Moseley Festival at the crick- et hut. It was all acoustic, we just did half an hour set, we didn’t really know what we were going to do, but there was something about the way we played together, you could hear a pin drop, the listening was so special. It was the most exquisite thing; it’s not about scale, or how big the stage is, or
the monitors, or money, it’s all about the closeness that you feel with people and what we feel between us.
Penny: “That place had amazing wall-
paper, like something out of a David Lynch film. You never know where you’ll find tran- scendence.”
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eports from their recent gig at Sidmouth on a double bill with Spiro, suggest they found it there, and confirmed their place alongside the Bristol band among the front runners of current English instrumental music. If you consider a line from Leveret (fR 379/380) whose music you think must be totally arranged yet is, extraordinarily, totally improvised – and who included one of Andy Letcher’s tunes on their debut album – to Spiro (fR 365) which, though amazingly tight and precise- ly arranged, is so freeing you think it must be totally improvised, then Telling The Bees would fall somewhere in the middle. They tend to stick to the arrangements but jam onstage occasionally – as Letcher says, “the edges get blurred when the spirit is there”.
Their sound has benefited from the addition of Jim Penny, who joined the band 2012 after moving to Oxford having secured a job at the Botanical Gardens. Although Letcher met Penny at Catweazle, the two shared the same traveller musical back- ground, particularly that centred on the fes- tival at St Chartier in France (the Rencontres des Luthiers et Maitres Sonneurs), the inspi- ration for One More Mazurka – a place where “folk music is a liberation from the humdrum mainstream world”.
Penny, says Letcher, “never plays the same thing twice, so has helped loosen things up, (the line he plays in One More
Mazurka, verse three, ‘the hare’s path lies over the downs’ is just utterly inspired and makes me well up every time I hear it – was different on every take!) He’s an extremely rhythmic player and added a bit of funki- ness. And perhaps a bit more darkness too. He’s brought a bit of a shonky swagger.”
The band have become less worried over three albums about whether the recordings accurately reflect their live sound. This has freed them up in terms of arrange- ments and encouraged the subtle inclusion of found sound, such as birdsong or bashing metal in the middle of the night on a hill above Avebury. It allows their recordings to really encapsulate a sense of time and place that in turn evokes their environmental con- cerns. These of course are also conveyed by their name. Telling The Bees is the old English custom of keeping the individuals in your hive up to speed re the goings-on in your household, in the belief that these reg- ular news bulletins will keep them alive and happy and producing honey.
The term suggested itself to Letcher as a name when he saw it on a calendar pre- senting a forgotten English phrase every day. He liked “the way the words rolled off the tongue and its weird folk angle.” It a name with a bardic connection that’s redo- lent with a sense of Englishness, which for Letcher “is all about the land, our changing relationship to the land, and the weight of the stories that accumulate in our being on the land, especially when those stories belong to outsiders.” In Steer By The Stars, Telling the Bees offer a refreshing ‘outsider’ perspective, creating a place where we might just think again about things we take for granted.