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n 1989 at Sidmouth Folk Festival, Woods met a young melodeon player by the name of Andy Cutting with whom he started a decades long musical alliance which blazed trails for the next generation of musicians to tread. “I do a very very specialised thing,” said Cutting of his own skill, his craft. “I’ve been massively lucky for Chris to have spotted that there is something in what I do. For him to ask me to work with him, and for it to have lasted so long, is incredible.”
Over the years, the duo of Wood & Cutting, made up of two mas- ters of their own craft, developed its own rhythm, its own way of working. “His music is the thing that comes through. I mean just the way he wants to express [the music].” explained Cutting. “The way Chris and I work for a lot of the time has been basically I play every- thing and he is the filigree if you like. He plays around the songs, and changes the tone and the feeling of the thing. I am driving along like the engine, and he is harmonising with it. Sometimes you have to keep your ear to the ground and stay solid so that he can fly.”
For all who have seen them live, would it surprise you to hear that up until four years ago they had rehearsed the grand total of three times? “We hardly ever talked about music and we never really rehearse either,” Cutting confessed. “You’re just happy to go with the flow, and you trust each other. Not everyone can do that. You can end up playing at the same time; parallel playing instead of play- ing with each other. It’s really hard to find people who are on the same wavelength as you. You can use a poncey word like ‘symbiosis’, but we just do our thing.”
A recent collaboration and change of direction for Wood has been producing the album Cracks In The Room by the Catriona Price and Esther Swift duo, Twelfth Day. “The amount of cerebral and imaginative real estate that project took up in my head left little space for anything else but it was such a blast,” Wood enthused about the project. “For me I guess, trust is the biggest element of collaboration. Real mutual trust doesn’t come easy but I must’ve got the production bug because I’m just about to produce another album for an Irish singer.”
His work with rapper, poet and musician Dizraeli also entered uncharted waters. “I learned a lot from [the collaboration]. It was his idea and it spurred me into a more ‘gobby’ way of writing, more ‘streety’, more grown up. [2013’s album] None The Wiser and [the track] A Whole Life Lived came out of that and for that, I will forever be in his debt.”
Photo: Douglas Robertson
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