f38
want to take credit for.” This, he argues – as he says does Martin Carthy – is part of the process in continuing the tradition. “Your job is to find your own truth within someone else’s work, find your own place in it and offer it up. You can’t destroy these songs, they’re all from documents and sources that aren’t going anywhere. Everyone can see our working forever.”
“T
Although they both now live in the North of England, Moray in Liverpool and Carter in Sheffield, they tend to work on songs remotely and communicate ideas via the internet. With the minimal, Radiohead- inspired and brilliantly realised William Glenn, Carter says, they composed it by sending ideas over the phone. The song is typical of their first-class arrangements; the album’s opening track in particular, with the horn line pulling across the beat in the ‘middle eight’, brings to mind McArthur Park by the masterful Jimmy Webb.
Moray says that his role is to “provide light and shade, the bigger picture stuff. Making sure that things go up or down a gear at the right moment.” Some ideas come as a surprise, “There are unintended things,” though he’ll try to embrace them.
he more I play tradition- al music,” says Moray, “the more I realise my folk heroes wrote more of the songs than they
(He has, it turns out, the Oblique Strate- gies app). But he says “Nothing is there by mistake. Things play out. I think that was good, how can I learn? My way of produc- ing things is that you don’t make do. It’s a voyage of discovery. Like a sculptor seeing the shape within the stone. I think, ‘how can I move along on this voyage?’”
Carter says, “There’s a lot more writ- ing in what we do with this music than is acknowledged normally. We love the songs, we love the stories, it’s why we want to work with traditional music. Music is encoding something you can’t sum up with words and the audience has to decode it. If they can’t, you haven’t done your job.” Musically they’ve underpinned the narratives with subtle subtexts that inspire insight into the lyrics. But, Moray says, “We don’t want people to think how clever we are. We want them to enjoy it. We want them to be engaged in some- thing that’s interesting and joyful.”
The band plays to that effect and whilst Moray and Carter bring the music to the rehearsal studio (with the exception of Tom Moore’s composition The Ombuds- man), this line-up of first-class musicians informs Harmonograph’s distinct sound (which features some fine vocal har- monies). Aside from drummer Stuart Provan, they all grew up steeped in the folk tradition.
Provan, one of the providers of those vocal harmonies, says that as a child he liked to pretend he was Queen’s Roger Taylor and began playing drums at the age of ten. He says he was “incredibly lucky to be taught by Paul Francis (drummer with Tony Jackson, Maggie Bell, Bill Wyman and Steve Harley amongst many others) who would open up my ears to all genres and styles on the kit, and still to this day is one of my biggest influences. As a teenager I remember hearing Want One by Rufus Wainwright for the first time and being absolutely floored by it. Artists like Ben Folds Five, Rocket From The Crypt, The Flaming Lips, Baxter Dury, The World Infer- no Friendship Society and The Police all had the right ingredients for me. I think False Lights can go wherever it wants to go. Whilst obviously rooted in folk, for me the beauty of this band lies in the lack of a set genre and sonic boundaries. The diver- sity of all the musicians in the band and what we do in our other guises means that we all bring a different view to the table.”
P
rovan’s partner in the rhythm section, bassist Barnaby Stradling, is the son of folk’s Rod and Danny Stradling and his performing career started
early. A member of the ‘folk youth’ band Bits Of Kids, comprising young musicians who grew up festival-going with their parents, he’s the same generation as Eliza Carthy. Stradling played in (and recorded with) her early bands including 1997’s Eliza Carthy & The Kings Of Calicutt, and is in her current big ensemble The Way- ward Band, which has several nominations in the bag at this year’s Folk Awards. With fellow Wayward Band member Lucy Far- rell, Stradling is also part of the virtuoso line-up in Steve Malley’s exciting experi- mental project Dark Northumbrian. Stradling’s dance band credentials run from performing with his parents in the ’80s English ceilidh/reggae fusion band Edward II & The Red Hot Polkas (now E2), through the English drone-based Blowz- abella and the new Anglo-French Topette!! along with Andy Cutting.
Tom Moore (violin and harmony vocals), who composed the album’s only instrumental track, learnt violin from the age of four by ear and started playing fid- dle tunes when he was ten. When he joined False Lights he was still studying for his music degree at Goldsmiths. The band’s debut gig at Folk East in 2014 was the first time he’d performed “with a loud electric band. It was great fun! In a larger, louder ensemble, my part is about supporting the song rather than being an especially prominent feature – I find myself playing a lot of rhythmic stuff and locking into a groove with Archie [Churchill-Moss, accordeon] and with Stuart on drums. Try- ing to adapt an English fiddle style, which is generally about rhythmic nuance and implication, to sit on top of chunky distort- ed riffs is an interesting game… I find myself playing a real mixture of parts ranging from textural to choppy, and there is a definite fluidity live.”
Like Moore and Provan, Churchill- Moss was just ten when he got going on his instrument. He met up with Moore a
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148
