The UT Archives: Jack Hayter - Abbey Wood (Gare Du Nord)

Jack Hayter has recorded a new session for my Dandelion show, which you can hear from 1 September. If that seems an impossibly long time to wait for something so wonderful, you could do worse than make use of the time in between by checking out Jack's back catalogue. To speed you in that direction, here's a review I did of his Abbey Wood album back in April 2018:

Jack Hayter - Abbey Wood (Gare Du Nord) 

The title of Jack Hayter's wonderful new album comes from the road in which he lived four years ago but the symbol that lies at the heart of the album's first track 'The Mulberry Tree at Abbey Wood' - which I played in my Dandelion Radio show last month - is loaded with far great depth

In particular the tree - 'you know the one, there's only one' as its lyrics tell us - stand as a metaphor that's explored throughout the collection.  It's a collection that's rich with feelings of solitude, yet it's a resilient solitude, loaded with a defiant spirit that manages to survive despite hostile surroundings.

On the surface, it's an album about places, but really it's about the people who give those places their character, characters like 'Fanny On The Hill', who serves up a liquid dinner with 'whisky for pudding'

Or the narrator of 'I Sent My Love To Bendigo', who fights his war in the farmyard, in attempt to stop the army from taking his beloved horse to war.  His brother goes to war in order to end the fighting with his girlfriend over the issue, only to return, broken, to hang himself at Christmas.  Under its original title of 'Horsemeat For Dogs', we featured an early version of the track on an Unwashed Territories compilation.  Its redolence has not diminished in the year since.

Similarly 'The Arandora Star', the tale of the ship loaded with British-based Italian and German civilians that was sunk during World War II, offers much poignancy against a backdrop of the sad xenophobia of these times.    As with Woody Guthrie's 'Deportees', the power lies in the evocation of individual lives behind the tragedy - the Italian women who'd helped to build bombers in north Manchester among them - leaving again a sense of real people devoured by circumstances they had no role in instigating.   I'm playing the track in my show this month.

it's a powerful collection, but it's also infused with a gentle, kind spirit.  A celebration of people and places, no less who, like the Mulberry Tree, still stand defiant despite it all.  Among them, unquestionably, stands Hayter himself.

Get it at here.

Diane Marie Kloba

Among the many artists featured in my 20 years of Dandelion Radio retrospective a few stand out as regulars of my show over a long period of time. Among them is Diane Marie Kloba. From Chicago, Diane's music and vocal style sound unlike anything else. I love artists whose style is so distinctive it's hard to guess at the influences behind them. There aren't many such artists but Diane's music has passed this stringest test with every album she's made.

Not only that, but each album tends to contain some element that manages to surpass its predecessor in terms of its framing of Diane's distinctive vocal style. Her tenth, Red Sun, came out last year. 'These songs take on a serious tone but I am seeking to convey a spirit of optimism and forward thinking outlook,' comments Diane in the album notes. It's a defiant album created by an artist standing for humanity, vulnerability and perception amid the chaos of an America that's not just lost its way, but has found another, very dangerous one. But beneath the fragility of Diane's songs lies a profoundly human strength and that's exactly what we need right now.

The track I'm playing in my show this week is one that featured in a session Diane did for us in 2018, featuring three acoustic versions of her songs, including the one I feature, an acoustic version of her wonderfully evocative Took the Train Alone. The songs were released on an EP called Deep Heart Acoustic, which is available for NYP here.