f24 Veiled References
Lisa Knapp’s been taking her time over that ‘difficult’ second album, but the extraordinary results will thrill and even shock. Colin Irwin hunted her down in deepest Wimbledon, and Judith Burrows got the photos.
R
ockall… Malin… Bailey… Fair Isle… Tyne… Dogger… Forties… Cromarty… Faeroes… Such evocative imagery. Such an entrancing swirl of danger,
romance and mystique. Just the sound of them lifts your heart. They feel so majes- tic, remote and lonely, yet oh so familiar too. Don’t you just love those names?
’Course you do – let’s have some more.
Viking… Humber… North Utsire… South Utsire… Sole… Hebrides… Lundy…Fisher… Fastnet… North Biscay… and – wait for it – everyone’s favourite, German Bight. Who doesn’t swoon to the immortal words, “German Bight, west or northwest gale to storm force ten expect- ed imminent”?
Well OK, if you’re out in the North Sea heading full tilt for German Bight and you suddenly hear a storm force ten is hiding round the corner waiting to blow you halfway to Holland then there’s probably not too much swooning involved; but for those of us snuggled up cosy in a warm bed in Blighty, the Shipping Forecast is an extraordinarily comforting and reassuring constant in our lives.
All is surely well with Britain while we
still have The Archers, Test Match Special, Desert Island Discs and the Shipping Fore- cast on our wirelesses… especially now that even if we occasionally miss one of the forecasts (say, the 00.48am bulletin) we need not be bereft with dear Mr iPlay- er ready to step into the breach. Forget therapy or stress balls, when life gets too much to bear, just tune in to hear the weather forecast for Dogger, Cromarty and Fastnet… that’ll sort you out.
Long an iconic institution in broad- casting folklore, The Shipping Forecast was at the centre of an, ahem, storm when the name of Finisterre was changed to FitzRoy in 2002 (in honour of Robert FitzRoy, inventor of the weather forecast apparently) and it has made its mark on popular culture too with musical refer- ences along the way from the likes of Blur, Wire, Jethro Tull and Radiohead. Poets Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy have put it into verse; Stephen Fry has parodied it; John Prescott has read it on air; Beck and the blessed Andy White have sampled it and the late Marti Caine even included it in her Desert Island Discs.
Mark Damazer, former controller of BBC Radio 4, sums up its bizarre appeal rather well. “It scans poetically, it’s got a rhythm of its own, it’s eccentric, it’s
unique, it’s English and it’s slightly mysteri- ous because nobody really knows where the places are…”
A helpless devotee of this “nightly litany of the sea”, Lisa Knapp knows exactly what he’s talking about. It’s a cliché that great singers can sing the tele- phone directory and make it sound pro- found but Lisa has gone one better by singing The Shipping Forecast. It’s the first track on her new album Hidden Seam and it’s… well, it’s mind-boggling. In a good way. In a very good way.
All sad eyes and weepy voice, she really belts it out. “Rockall… Faeroes… Tyne… Fair Isle…” over an unnervingly weird beat- en autoharp and before you know it you’re pinned to the wall by some sort of irrepress- ible unseen force, perhaps allowing your- self the faintest glimmer of a smile as you realise she’s singing, well, she’s singing The Shipping Forecast. Though she calls it The Shipping Song. Or, in days of excessive mad- ness on the road she’ll parody herself, change the seafaring names to grocery items and call it The Shopping Song.
To Lisa this all seems perfectly normal. Her obsession with The Shipping Forecast is not only reflected in a mostly self-written album in which the sea and all who sail in her (oh yes, death and mortality too) play a prominent role, but in her whole approach to the power of language and the sound and rhythm of words as a self- contained entity. It’s all Seamus Heaney’s fault apparently.
Lisa is married to Gerry Diver, a brilliant multi-instrumentalist and producer (knob- twiddler-in-chief for, among other things, Sam Lee’s A Ground Of Its Own album) who painstakingly grafted one of the most origi- nal albums of recent years, The Speech Pro- ject, setting to music the speech patterns of various prominent Irish artists, from Christy Moore and Margaret Barry to Shane Mac- Gowan and Martin Hayes, and which was recently named by Tom Robinson as one of his thirteen favourite albums of all time along with the likes of Stevie Wonder, Rolling Stones, The Cure and Public Enemy. There was talk at one point of Seamus Heaney recording something for the album and Gerry and Lisa duly went along to a production of his work at the London’s National Theatre to meet him.
“I thought if we’re going to meet him I’d better read some of his poems which were amazing. He’d just done his transla- tion of Beowulf so I bought that and I was really struck by some old Anglo-Saxon
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