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It sets everything up and so the audience become more immersed in that world. I also talk a lot about the background of the songs from the stage when we’re playing. It’s surprising how knowl- edgeable people are about the Franklin expedition; it’s definitely a story that hits a nerve with many people.”
Some of the material is familiar but lots more is wilfully obscure. Talk us through some of the stranger pieces.
“The songs from the North Georgia Gazette are pretty out there! They’re from one of the newspapers printed onboard exploration ships. Death Of A Gull is about some seagulls who really existed and is the story of what happened when they shot the parents, leaving two baby gulls to survive on their own in the cold. I mean, where do you find material like that? Song Of The Sledge is from 1851; it’s from a sheet printed on board The Reso- lute, which was a British ship sent out to search for Franklin after he’d disappeared. It got stuck in the ice and was abandoned; a year later it was found adrift by an American whale ship and taken back to America, where it was refurbished and given as a gift to Queen Victoria. When the ship was eventually broken up, some of its timbers were used to make a desk which was gifted to the American President of the time. It’s the desk that you now see Donald Trump sitting behind in the Oval Office at the White House. Now that’s a desk that’s had a life. From the birth of Song Of The Sledge to Trump.”
W arrangement.
“I think with Franklin we were a bit more confident in what we were doing as it was the second album; we’ve played together more as well. Both our albums have been pretty much recorded in a live way. We sit down and play the songs and nearly all of the lead vocals are from those takes. We might then do a few over- dubs onto these live performances or not if they’re not needed. It means that live we sound pretty much like we do on record, as the recording is just us.”
It was, after all, recorded in a mission church. “We were in the process of pulling together the material for
the Franklin album when we did a show of our whaling songs with Tim Eriksen in St. Andrew’s in Gravesend. I didn’t realise the con- nection to the place until I noticed a plaque on the wall dedicating the stained glass to the sailors on Franklin’s ships who had per- ished, paid for by Lady Franklin. The ceiling in the mission is made to look like an inverted ship’s hull, wooden with big struts. The acoustic in there is great. It juts out into the Thames, waves crash- ing into its walls with the wakes of the huge cargo ships sailing out from London Port. It would have been very hard for some- thing of that not to find itself in the spirit of the record. I mean, Franklin must have sailed within a few hundred yards of that spot on his way out to the icy North.”
Ben, Richard and Evan will be out during 2018 weaving their gothic, spooked, maritime soundscapes around trad sources at var- ious locations.
The walrus smiles happily and then swims away into the vast Arctic Ocean. Seek him out for yourself.
kingsofthesouthseas.net F
e chew over the fallout that still adheres to Franklin’s story and how much is still unresolved. There’s James Taylor’s Frozen Man. “Yes, it’s amazing how much creativity has been inspired by the story of Franklin, I think there’s just some- thing about it that really resonates with people,” murmurs Ben. Then there are the bodies on which the song’s based. The pictures are evocative and eerie, Ben concurs. “Yes, those bodies buried at Beechey Island are a strange link back in time; they look like they died recently, but in fact it was nearly 170 years ago. You’re literal- ly looking at these historical figures straight in the face.”
There were reports of cannibalism by the local Innuit. “When John Rae came back with stories of cannibalism which he had heard from the Inuit, London society, including Dickens, totally shunned them. Pretty much everything that they had said has sub- sequently proven to be totally accurate, including the locations of his two ships (HMS Erebus and Terror), which have recently been found. It’s testament to their oral tradition that the stories were passed on in such an accurate fashion.”
Somehow the new album seems larger in terms of sound and
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