Craig Fortnam’s most recent surfacing (as North Sea Radio Orchestra) was a Robert Wyatt tribute event back in June, accompanied by assorted European Canterbury-scene aficionados and former Henry Cow-ers. Increasingly, that Wyatt connection’s cleaving more and more closely to his own work. It’s not that he absolutely takes on board that Wyatt whimsicality, the covers work or the delightful melting song-rambles: it’s more something about the lack of pomp, in particular in the tone of voice. Like Wyatt, Craig sings in an unaffected, unperformed manner – a delicate cupboard-voice, a step up from speech or chat, allowing itself to be frail but unsilenced: a singing style that’s like a confidence quietly shared in the back booth of a pub.
While this has been evident in Craig’s vocal moments with NSRO, it’s always been more present in his smaller-scale singer-songwriter work as Arch Garrison, in which he’s less sheltered behind chamber woodwinds and strings. Originally a trio including bass, subsequently trimmed to the two-man interplay between Craig and the delightfully welling, psychedelic-chapel keyboard work of James Larcombe, the upcoming English tour sees AG as Craig on his own – just his voice and artful nylon-string guitar, fingerpicked in a way which suggests a British answer to John Fahey’s American Primitive style while drawing from classical, flamenco, African stylings and intents. New songs are promised, adding to Craig’s existing repertoire of soft pushings and reflections on family, geological time, bereavement, and contact with one’s surroundings.
Craig’s tourmate is Emily Jones – a singer-songwriter who’s a little further underground, with only a single 2014 debut album to her name compared to Craig’s batch of projects (although she’s also made marks via a split woodland-folkadelic album with The Rowan Amber Mill). That said, she’s been making progressively bigger splashes this year; emerging from cottages in Cornwall and Salisbury for a growing number of concert appearances. This tour will be her biggest effort to date – six shows up and down the country bringing her feathery songs of hauntings and lovings which blur in and out of folk mythology and present day magic, accessible and human with a gentle wash of acid dreaming and folk baroque.
Along the way, there’ll be various other meetings. In Hexham, it’s just the two of them playing; but in Weston-super-Mare, they’re part of the Winter Warmer event at the Sunfold Hotel, the Weston-super-Mare guest house which is emerging as an occasional local stronghold for music (thanks to the affable-evil presence of Steven Morricone, the more gonzoid of the two Scaramanga Six frontmen, as co-owner). Not only is Steven playing host, he’ll also be spending time onstage maltreating the piano with his Steven Morricone Tyranny solo project, indulging self-confessed “straw man with a fist of ham” tendencies with a clutch of assorted Scaramanga songs (presumably his own more psychobilly offerings, though he’s recently been straying into more obscure and theatrical art-rock set pieces with assorted flavours of Faust, theatre and radio art), plus some new solo stuff and the odd cover.
Also playing are Brum-born but Cornwall-settled duo We Are Muffy, in which The Lilac Time’s Nick Duffy and Ambassadors Of Sorrow leader/frontwoman Angeline Morrison conjure up “poetic narratives of remembered and imagined pasts, combining vocal harmonies with unexpected instrumentation” – somewhere at the country-folk end of the Witchseason sound, with American banjos and fingerpicked guitar dissolving into more British concerns and storytelling styles.
In Hereford, Craig and Emily are playing with spooky sometime Omnia Opera/7shades singer Libbertine Vale, who sets aside the psych/prog electric trappings of her bandwork in favour of macabre a capella renditions of melancholic folk songs about oppression, cruelty and general perishing, albeit with “seeds of renewal”. You don’t get to see much of Libbertine outside of Birmingham and Herefordshire (where she contributes to the county’s growing reputation for psychedelic folk and sundry hauntological business by co-running Unorthodox Paradox), and she spends much of her time on subversive textile art rather than on music, so it’s best to catch her when you can. Especially since her solo act has, so far, resisted the pull of the internet – so no videos or soundclips here.
The Garrison/Jones booking at a Buds and Spawn night in Sheffield is supported by guitar-and-banjo-toting female harmony trio Little Robots. Though the latter have been going for about a decade, they’re busy women with a host of other activities and a commitment to the moment, so actual recordings are intermittent. You can scoop up what there is from their Bandcamp and Soundcloud pages: doses of impeccable Appalachian/Yorkshire fusion.
In Oxford, the support act is “singer-songwriter-psychedelicatessen” Adam S. Leslie, as his Berlin Horse project, wrapping spiky, silly absurdities, Ray Davies echoes and moments of quirky beauty in unalloyed Pepper-flavoured lushness (like an old Puffin Books joke anthology with extra swirl, wit and Lowrey organ colour)
London is the only date for which Arch Garrison will be a twosome, with James Larcombe returning to the fold. They’ll also be meeting up with Chlöe Herington. Temporarily disengaged from pumping regal bassoons and saxophones into the psychedelia of Knifeworld and Hirvikolari, from celebrating Lindsay Cooper in the Songbook project and from the three-headed avant-femme art-music project that her onetime solo outlet VALVE has become, she’s promised to occupy herself in “rebirthing some very old stuff (the vaults have been unsealed!) and reworking some more recent.”
There are no questions about the folky character of the Salisbury gig – it’s being played with Emily and Craig sandwiched between Ian A. Anderson and Pete Aves. Ian’s credentials are impeccable – a veteran British folkster of five decades standing, continuously active since the mid-60s, he’s led the field in acoustic country blues, had a long spell as head of The Village Thing acid folk label, has been a concert promoter and a critic (in particular, as the leading light of ‘Folk Roots’ magazine. Now in his seventies, for the last couple of years he’s been writing and playing solo again. This year’s ‘Onwards’ album compiles, in his own words “fifty years of deathfolk, blues, psych-fi, trad and world twang.”
As for guitarist/banjoist Pete, he too has been returning to solo work after the drying-up of work as regards his role in the currently slumbering High Llamas (and, more seriously, the uprootings and traumas of a divorce and spell of homelessness). Inspired by his recent travails, he’s now turning out simple songs of reproach, road life, and thumbnail character sketches, mostly in an Anglo-American country-folk vein.
* * * * * * * *
Both Craig and Emily will also be heading down to Brighton on 21st December to play “little guest sets” at the Winter Wonderland concert headed up by Spratleys Japs, featuring yet another joyfully incestuous array of the British psychedelic stew that bubbles around Cardiacs (see passim…).
The event’s already entirely sold out; but assuming that you can manage to prise a ticket from the cold, dead hand of a Cardiacs fan or an eager Brighton psychonaut, what you’ll be seeing apart from Emily and Craig includes the “lo-fi arty ska” of Hot Sauce Pony, a raucous Brixton four-piece with a lineup including the Gilchrist husband-and-wife couple (singer Caroline and bass player Steve, the latter better known as Stephen Evens, as the “Stuffy” in stuffy/the fuses, as a one-tour Cardiac or as the kit-thrasher behind Graham Coxon) and onetime Rat The Magnificent guitarist Ross Davies. They’ve been touting around a Steve Albini-recorded debut album this year. North-western art pop duo Army Of Moths may have had to cancel, but another longterm Cardiacs affiliate, Matthew Cutts, will be spouting some kind of poetry.
Probably the big draw this year, though, is the resurrected Panixphere – the elusive Cardiacs-family thrash-rock band who’ve surfaced occasionally over the past four decades to play a frustrating brief handful of blasting sets and then immediately dipped back underground. Inasmuch as they’ve had much consistent about them, it’s been Bic Hayes – the intermittently active, sputtering jewel of a guitarist/singer whose juddery, effects-laden playing (like Keith Levene invading a fiery Hawkwind lineup) has graced recordings and concerts by Cardiacs, ZOFFF, Levitation and Dark Star, Pet Shop Boys, Heidi Berry and Julianne Regan’s short-lived Mice. In Panixphere, though, he’s off the leash and free from the big concept or the psychedelic ritual. Historically, it’s been a band in which to drink too much beer and play music much too fast, in snotty punk-metal tradition (albeit while test-bedding or providing an alternative vehicle for assorted Cardiacs and Levitation material, as well as crunchy cover versions of songs by XTC, Nomeansno and, if suitably distracted, early Genesis).
Now, however, Panixphere seem to be taking things a bit more seriously, announcing their return with a swishy verbal fanfare and too many capital letters. “A Three Piece. Three timelines. Formed in 1984. Re-imagined in 1992. Returning in 2020. Experience The Past, Present and Future, simultaneously, in PANIXPHERE – appearing LIVE for the first time in 25 years – preview titles from the FORTHCOMING album ‘Cryptic’, currently under construction and to be unveiled in 2020. This Show Is A Beginning.”
While the lineup has previously included (at various points), Craig Fortnam, Cardiacs capo Tim Smith, Bic’s Levitation/Dark Star bandmate David Francolini and mysterious south London 1980s festi-freaks “Little Hicky” and “Flat Hat’, the revived version is a power trio including singing/shouting bassist Jon Poole (back for a second stint) and Cardiacs drummer Bob Leith. Here’s a clip of an earlier Panixphere, complete with Tim Smith, banging about onstage in 1993. Whether they’ll be any less unruly a quarter-century further on – well, it’s possible but not guaranteed. All this talk of an album, though, suggests that for the first time ever they’re thinking beyond the present, or following through on plans which have previously stalled in a shower of rude fat sparks.
As for the headliners, read here for a more in-depth account of Spratleys Japs’ original life as a Tim Smith/Jo Spratley parallel-to-Cardiacs weird-pop studio project, half-hearted disguised as bizarre pond-scummed Anglo-American swamp rock; and of their recent Tim-less/Tim-blessed live revival, with Jo now fronting a selection of Brighton psychedelic luminaries. Still reanimating the original Smith material, they’re now broadening out with their own new work as well as a couple of unheard Smith treasures.
With Jo now handling all of the vocals – and with Tim’s fuming-friendly/baleful-brotherly presence restricted to an affectionate memory – the band have indubitably lost some of their original charismatic quirk and danger. In return, though, they’ve gained a greater access to the beauty behind the music’s peculiar angles and gurgles, which refracted elements of glam, imaginary folk, tastes of post-Bostonian punkaroo (think Pixies, Throwing Muses, Breeders) and celestial Mellotron-classical through a skewed Smithian prism… and which still does, dropping it all off into a murky forest pool surrounded by tea-lights, traces of spontaneous ritual and the odd piece of trash. They’re a warmer proposition than they were before – now unrestricted by that Cardiacs tradition of onstage aggro and awkwardness, Jo’s now playing things more as a dancing priestess than the punkette muse she might have been before, blossoming even as the music does.
If all of this still seems compelling despite your lack of a ticket, word’s coming through that the whole shebang’s going to be live-streamed worldwide, in order to raise further funds for Tim Smith’s palliative care. More details on the event page, with the streaming link here.
* * * * * * * *
Dates:
Arch Garrison/Emily Jones tour:
- ’Winter Warmer’ @ The Sunfold Hotel, 39 Beach Road, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, BS23 1BG, England – Wednesday 11th December 2019, 7.30pm (with We Are Muffy + The Steven Morricone Tyranny) – information here
- ’Weirdshire’ @ The Babar Café, 31 Union Street, Hereford, Herefordshire, HR1 2BT, England – Thursday 12th December 2019, 7.30pm (with Libbertine Vale) – information here
- The Vault, 22-24 Hallgate, Hexham, Northumbria, NE46 1XD, England – Friday 13th December 2019, 8.00 pm – information here, here and here
- ’Buds & Spawn’ @ The Dorothy Pax, Arch 17, Wharf Street, Victoria Quays, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, S2 5SY, England – Saturday 14th December 2019, 8.00pm (with Little Robots) – information here and here
- The Library, 182 Cowley Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX4 1UE, England – Sunday 15th December 2019, 8.00pm (with Berlin Horse) – information here and here
- The Harrison, 28 Harrison Street, Kings Cross, London, WC1H 8JF, England – Monday 16th December 2019, 7.30pm (with Chlöe Herington) – information here
- The Winchester Gate, 113-117 Rampart Road, Salisbury, Wiltshire, SP1 1JA, England- Tuesday 17th December 2019, 7.30pm (with Ian A. Anderson + Pete Aves) – information here and here
Wonderful Winter Wonderland Special 2019 (featuring Spratleys Japs, Panixphere + Hot Sauce Pony + Army Of Moths + Arch Garrison + Emily Jones + Matthew Cutts)
The Green Door Store, 2-4 Trafalgar Arches, Lower Goods Yard, Brighton Train Station, Brighton, BN1 4FQ, England
Saturday, 21 December 2019, 5.30pm – information here and here
Misfit City 