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year later at the Cambridge Folk Festival Hub Band Project and the pair formed a duo. He says, “I grew up listening to a lot of French traditional music, this was what my dad was heavily into. When I first took up accordeon I was given a cou- ple of CDs by two bands, Djal and Tapage, they were wicked! I remember hearing how bassy the accordeon could sound and have since been trying to replicate this. I wasn't really that inter- ested in English traditional music until the age of fifteen/sixteen, around the same time as I got into Spiro from Bristol. I listen to a lot of pop music and more recently to a lot of mid-to-late noughties pop punk. I learn the riffs on accordeon – it’s great practice.”
Joining False Lights more recently than Moore, he says, “It’s been a real insight into the variety of roles you can ful- fil on the same instrument. In most of my other projects I have always been a lead melody player; in False Lights I have to find new ways of making my parts distinguish- able over two overdriven guitars.”
As a band, says Carter, “We just want to be modern musicians playing tradition- al songs.” And as modern musicians they promote their music in a modern way, which also adds another layer of meaning to those traditional songs. The wonderful- ly simple YouTube video accompanying their beautiful Crossing The Bar from their debut album Salvor takes the reference in Tennyson’s poem from the sea and sends it out into space.
Nadel (drums), Nick Cooke (melodeon) and Jon Thorne on bass, as well as Moore, Carter and Moray (with Nick Malcolm and Jack Rutter providing trumpet and har- monica respectively on the album). In the light of Harmonograph, it’s almost as if Moray and Carter were then testing the water. With this second album they’ve plunged in, confident in their creation – and with a bigger recording line-up that includes Laurence Hunt (percussion), Joshua Poole (saxophones), Roland Par- sons (trumpet), Jo May (spoons) and Danny Pedlar (hurdy gurdy drones).
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Carter and Moray self-fund this pro- ject and sell the releases over the internet on their own label, Wreckord, a play on the novel from which they take their name, Bella Bathurst’s 2005 The Wreckers. In promoting the band, the iconography of Carter and Moray in particular, like the music they create, references their main- stream musical heroes, flinging the doors open to a non-folk audience.
“It says a lot about folk,” says Moray, “that people want to tag us as being experimental. But I think we’re pushing at the middle. It’s accessible, not fringe. We’re releasing very mainstream, easy to understand records. Our intention is to make the song really good. To show it in its best light. Folk has become a genre
eleased in early 2015, Salvor was noted for its “impressive variety,” the work of a “brave- ly original rock band.” False Lights then featured Sam
based on sound. But folk is categorised by how it’s got there. It’s the process that’s taken a song to reach us that makes it folk; not the instrumentation, but the pairs of hands it’s gone through.”
When bands like the Byrds in the US first added rock to folk in the ’60s, the rock element was that forged by British beat groups like the Beatles. When Fairport Convention entered the fray in the UK they fused folk with the then-contempo- rary late ’60s and early ’70s rock music. That – with a few exceptions such as ’80s band Jumpleads – has provided the tem- plate for folk rock ever since. In effect it retired to bed with a headache as rock music moved on in the outside world, into which it would step occasionally, appear- ing tired, dated and predictable, like the dad rock bands down the pub.
Carter says, “When we started False Lights, we didn’t want to mimic the folk- rock revival. Rather, we set out to look at the concept afresh.” This resulted in their drawing board gleaming with the rich pati- na of traditional folk sources and the many-hued patterns of their contemporary musical passions. It’s folk rock, but it’s new, fresh, exciting, and once again relevant. Springing from the combination of their stellar musical talent, this exhilaratingly accessible modern music warrants main- stream success. False Lights have created a newly inspiring folk-rock template for the 21st century. See you in the mosh pit.
falselights.co.uk/harmonograph F
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