retropop

Sea shanties and storm ballads

sayitwithgarageflowers2 Comments

Richard-hawley

Those of you who are familiar with velvet-voiced crooner
Richard Hawley will know that the sea is a recurring theme in his
work.

Sheffield’s answer to Roy Orbison even recently hosted a Radio 2 show
called The Ocean, which was named after his song of the same name and
looked at the history of seafaring towns in the UK.

New from Hawley this month is False Lights From The Land – a limited
edition EP that’s made up of four tracks that are all
inspired by the sea.

Comprising two original Hawley compositions
(Remorse Code and There’s A Storm A Coming) and two cover versions of
sea shanties (The Ellan Vannin Tragedy and Shallow Brown), it’s a
great little record that has drawn me in like, ahem, false lights from
the land.

Remorse Code was featured on Hawley’s last album, the wonderful
Truelove’s Gutter, and at nearly 10 minutes long is a spiralling,
twilight ballad that’s loaded with nautical imagery, but is also about
a friend who has gone off course and sunk to unimaginable depths,
driven by drink and drugs. It’s a beautiful song, laced with gorgeous
twangy guitar and slightly eerie atmospherics.

The other original song could have been lifted from his
Coles Corner album. There’s A Storm A Coming is yet another sublime
Hawley ballad, but lighter than his latest work, it’s a shuffling,
sentimental ’50s-style pop tune that sounds like it’s been around
forever. One for the mums and dads. And for melancholy muso journos in
their late thirties. Lovely.

Both of the remaining two tracks feature female folk duo The Smoke
Fairies (terrible name). Shallow Brown is a traditional acapella
number, but the real gem is The Ellan Vannin Tragedy.

A mournful, haunting folk song written by Hugh E Jones of The Spinners,
it tells the tale of a ship that sank in ferocious waters just outside
Liverpool after leaving Ramsey on the Isle of Man on 3 December 1909,
losing all 21 crew and 14 passengers.

Hawley’s version sounds like he’s set sail on a ship bound for hell,
with Nick Cave as the captain, while a funereal cello drones in the??background.??

Careful – it’ll drag you under and you’ll never be seen again.

Storming stuff, indeed.

The twang is the thang!

sayitwithgarageflowers1 Comment

Duane

I’ve always had a thing (or should that a be a thang?) for twangy guitars.
And no-one does twangy guitar better than Duane Eddy.

When I was a kid, my dad often used to play Duane’s records in the??house, so I grew up with his unique baritone sound.??

However, I didn’t know that back in 1965, Duane made a whole album of
instrumental Bob Dylan songs.

The amusingly entitled, ahem, Duane Does Dylan, which I recently
stumbled across on iTunes, is a real rock and roll curio, from its
cool cover – Duane sat in a lounge cradling his guitar alongside two ‘dolly
birds’ – to its quirky takes on Dylan tunes – the blistering version
of House of the Rising Sun is awesome – all big, bad boss man guitar
and wailing blues harmonica.

Confusingly, there’s also a great cover of Barry McGuire’s Eve of
Destruction (one of my favourite songs of all time) included, although
it wasn’t ever recorded by Dylan. However, it was penned by songwriter
PF Sloan, who wrote Dylan-like material.

Anyway, it’s twang-tastic, all the same.

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/duane-does-dylan/id56217996

And while we’re on the subject of twangy sounds, here’s Jack
Nitzsche’s sublime The Lonely Surfer – an epic, cinematic track from
1963 that features plenty of cool baritone guitar.