When Ashley Hutchings and The Albion Band left the National Theatre after four years of inspiring and productive work in the late 1970s it was inevitable that they would never again just be a conventional gigging band.
Fast forward to the two thousands and Ashley continued to present original words and music performances. So now its time to present “More Songs From The Shows” highlights, covering shows over the last 6 years. In the past the Albions often had a massive floating line up but in recent years Ashley has worked with a much smaller number of musicians and singers such as Becky Mills, Ruth Angell and Blair Dunlop.
When you think of Ashley Hutchings, chances are you’ll think first of the folk rock pioneer, the scholarly reinvention of the English tradition for the electric age, and those irresistibly propulsive bass lines. But then there’s the rocker, the balladeer, and the multifaceted Musical Director at the National Theatre: the polymath always searching for the essence and making it new.
At this point in his distinguished career, Ninety-Nine. Impressions is both a surprise and the most logical album one could expect, being a sequence of poems and prose pieces set to minimal musical accompaniment. Spoken word has been a part of Ashley’s work since Steeleye Span, perhaps most notably on Rattlebone and Ploughjack and An Hour with Cecil Sharp, but this is the first album to be centred entirely upon the voice. While a long way from Folk Rock, what connects it to his most celebrated work from the past half-century or so is its historical and cultural depth reframed for the immediate present.
Making virtue of lockdown necessity, the album was initially conceived as a collage or conversation constructed from quotations Ashley had gathered in a treasured notebook over recent years: from books, television and radio, writers, artists and filmmakers sharing wisdom and bons mots over a soundtrack provided by Blair Dunlop and Jacob Stoney with Ruth Angell and Sid Peacock. At Blair’s suggestion, though, Ashley’s own poems and lyrics were added to the mix, and the project took on a whole new complexion.
The set begins with the possibly apocryphal quotation attributed to Camus: Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend, which sets the tone for what follows. It’s a record which privileges neither Ashley nor the gathered voices; rather, it’s a conversation amongst friends – at times profound but always playful – in which the listener is invited to join. Recorded from Ashley’s sofa with no studio effects, with intuitively sympathetic arrangements, it’s that rare thing: a spoken word album to be listened to over and over with new discoveries revealed each time.
Playfulness is definitely an element, confirms Ashley, and one of the games is to guess which of the illustrious cast of characters said what, while another is to make your own connections and interpretations. I can confirm that I think in heaven we should eat nothing but ice cream is from Angela Carter and nods towards Ashley’s legendary love of gelato, though any connection with the 99 of the album’s title is purely coincidental or, at least, subconscious.
Striking in its originality, Ninety-Nine. Impressions nonetheless feels like a record Ashley was always going to make and, as has so often been the case since those early Fairport albums, it brims with both intelligence and feeling. Ashley’s status as a pivotal figure in British folk and rock remains unassailable but as well as that: well, Shoot – that boy can write!
Pre-order the album here: https://talkingelephant.co.uk/product/ashley-hutchings-more-songs-from-the-shows-cd/
Tracklist:
- Welcome To The World
- Want Of Will
- Pedalling Suffragettes
- One-eyed Owl
- Song Of Two Bridges
- About Dawn
- Bird On A Wire
- Crazy Man Michael
- I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight
- Lay Down Your Weary Tune
- One Of Us Must Know
- Lost In The Haze
- Brief Encounters
- Devil May Care In Our Dancing Shoes
- Thirty-two Years And A Lifetime