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bar and started having a conversation about the kind of band we wanted to be in. We talked about our shared interest in Radiohead and the Longpigs and re- inventing the wheel and what would hap- pen if you combined this with ballads and folk songs.”
Underpinning this conversation was
Moray’s disillusion with touring and with folk rock that had a bad name because it’s “been mixed with a boorish, blokey thing that doesn’t chime with me.” He’d just come off a tour with what he describes as a big party band and was feeling like there was a lot of musical shouting and not much listening – bombast that just a few minutes with Moray show would not suit him.
Moray is earnest in his desire to be
clear, to be properly understood. And he is earnest in his worry about coming across as earnest, not realising that this doesn’t come across as tedious or worthy but rather as considered and thoughtful. His worry, I sus- pect, springs from a natural concern for what it might feel like to be in another’s shoes. It’s an empathy that facilitates his ability to communicate through music.
He says, “There’s a bigger stage, a widescreen music that I love; it’s expansive and communal. The party band approach is not communal, the ‘look at me!’ attitude is not what people want to celebrate. I feel kinship with the people onstage and towards the audience. Performing should be welcoming, asking, ‘Will you sing with me?’ But big folk music doesn’t feel like that. And it should.”
And so in the hotel bar with Carter the two talked about how Radiohead had transformed prog rock and created a unique sound, and asked themselves “Why couldn’t we do this with English tradition- al music? Why hasn’t folk rock evolved?” So they determined to recreate the ‘we’re in this together,’ cool gang approach of their separate teenage bands, form a group and start the revolution.
Moray’s parents met at the university folk club in Manchester. “Dad did a mas- ter’s in engineering, mum was a speech therapist.” They moved to “the suburbs of Stafford” and Moray was brought up lis- tening to his parents’ record collection. This featured Tubular Bells, Morris On (“the first real album of electric morris music”), Richard Thompson, John Kirk- patrick, Ashley Hutchings, and psychedelic guitar music.
His grandfather had been a “serious classical violinist” and also a serious climber, which put a stop to the playing. “He fell and broke his arm, which didn’t mend properly. He banned his children from playing instruments.” Consequently, Moray’s father bought every instrument he could, at the first opportunity. “We had loads of wheezy old instruments, man- dolins with five strings; I grew up in a house of broken instruments and being encouraged to play.”
His grandmother bought them a piano. Moray says, “I was obsessed with the piano, endlessly making things up,” and discovered he had a photographic memory for sound, repeating songs he heard on the radio, lyrics and all, straight
off, in one go. Having also got into drum- ming through playing the big bass drum to accompany his dad morris dancing (which inspired Moray’s abiding love of morris dancing too), he played orchestral percus- sion through school. In bands as a teenag- er, Moray preferred to sit behind the drums rather than wield a guitar. “I wasn’t so keen on playing guitar; Dad twisted my arm when I was 13 or 14.”
A
defining moment for Moray was when he unwrapped a Tascam Portastudio (a four- track recorder). “I was fifteen or sixteen. It was the single
biggest present, a turning point in my life.” By then he owned an electric bass, a guitar, a drum kit and a piano. Self-suffi- cient on the band front, he was, however, in a group at school with a guitar player with access to a garage, featuring all the necessary amps and room for a drum kit. Moray wrote the songs, influenced by the Police – aged nine he saw Sting perform at Birmingham’s NEC – Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello, The Longpigs, Crispin Hunt, Radiohead and Blur, through which he discovered XTC “and Britpop, which coin- cided with being thirteen. We practised three days a week, and I recorded the bands I was in.”
Moray passed his Grade 8 theory when he was “quite young” and having piano lessons. “I got through my grades quite quickly. Theory only describes what you just did” (which, when he now teaches on the new BA Hons course in Folk Music at Leeds College Of Music, is what he tells his students). Moray took his own music degree at the Birmingham Conservatoire. He got in as a composer. “I didn’t really have an instrument, though I thought I was a drummer until I met proper drummers at Uni. Then I wasn’t a drummer any more.”
By inclination, Moray says he’s a mini- malist composer and was made to “feel valid at music college,” finding inspiration studying the works of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Michael Nyman – and in a workshop with Gavin Bryars – “Brilliant!” Honing his recording skills and compositional tech- nique, Moray used computers running composing software, first Notator Logic, then Pro Tools, which blew open his palette of sound, opening up almost limit- less musical possibilities.
Drawing on this new-found freedom, Moray turned to the folk music that had been intertwined with his life from the beginning and applied his skill with com- puter technology to make an album that he recorded by himself in his student bed- room. Sweet England, Colin Irwin noted in the Guardian, “had reviewers jumping with delight.” Uncut magazine called his use of computer technology “the most sig- nificant development in English folk since Fairport Convention's Liege And Lief.”
The album’s success landed Moray a publishing deal with big hitters Warner Chapel and this thoughtful 21-year-old was plunged into a chaotic round of being courted by major labels thinking they might have a chance of marketing “the next Seth Lakeman.” Happily for Moray he escaped the deadening grip of shiny, empty promises and short-term business
plans, though at the time, “sitting in the lobby and never quite signing” was quietly soul destroying.
However, his publishing deal allowed him to buy “loads of recording stuff” and keep going on his own, releasing subse- quent albums on his own label NIAG, including 2008 fRoots Critics Poll Album Of The Year Low Culture, and 2012 and 2016 runners-up Skulk and Upcetera.
Moving to Bristol from Birmingham and collaborating with various artists, not least his sister Jackie Oates on her acclaimed album Violet Hour, Moray began work as a producer, whilst continu- ing his own self-sufficient recording career. Discussing the pros and cons of being signed to a label he says it is irrele- vant. “I can’t jump now, I’ve established a way of working and would find it really hard to work in any other way.”
It’s a way that suits Sam Carter. Grow- ing up in Rutland, the child of musical par- ents who met at university whilst training to be teachers, his dad played guitar and mum played piano. The house resonated with the sounds of the Beatles, pop, classi- cal music and the songs of their local Baptist church. Carter says, “I was exposed early on to the idea that everyone sings and it’s OK for everyone to sing and to do that outside the home without being professional.”
Keen to play guitar, he was ten when his dad said, “OK. But you must first learn classical guitar and learn to sight-read and write music.” In church he loved the songs from the Sacred Harp songbook whilst also wanting to “rock out” at home. Having met his obligation re. the classical guitar canon, Carter got an electric guitar as a young teenager and played along to Nir- vana, Pearl Jam, Radiohead and the Long- pigs, absorbing it all “like a sponge.”
utting his teeth in his first school band Rust, he co-found- ed Mork (as in Mork and Mindy) and by the time the line-up had reached the grand old age of fifteen they won the title ‘Young Country Band Of The Year.’ This led to gigs that he fitted in around his studies until leaving for York University to study philosophy (“I liked the continen- tals, Sartre, Camus, rather than the analyt- ical stuff.”) He also played in a blues and rock band back home.
C
Inspired by Dylan, Neil Young, Nic Jones, John Martyn and Nick Drake (the latter two in particular revealing to Carter that it was perfectly fine to sing with an English accent), Carter picked up his acous- tic guitar and, as he puts it, started “telling stories, learning to write songs.” Moving down to Stoke Newington to “try and be a musician,” Sam Lee’s Magpie’s Nest opened the door to the London folk scene. Carter’s first recording Here In The Ground, released on his own label Captain Records in 2008, led to work with Nitin Sawney, resulting in a residency at the Southbank and a meeting with Bellowhead that later caused Jon Boden to describe him as “the finest English-style fingerpicking guitarist of his generation.” Collaborations with Bellowhead in general and Sam Sweeney in particular soon followed.
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