published: 24 /
12 /
2019
Label:
Harp and a Monkey
Format: CD
Eagerly awaited new album from Manchester-based trio A Harp and a Monkey takes us time travelling to the pop music of the 19th century, bridging the gap and making connections with our Victorian past
Review
I’ve been looking forward to the release of this album. It’s right up my street in more ways than one. I’ve been a fan of Harp & A Monkey’s adventurous approach to folk music for a couple of years. Martin Purdy, Andy Smith and Simon Jones know how to push the boundaries. Street wise these songs all mean something to me. I went to school and my first job was by the River Irwell in Salford, scene of the first track, 'A Naked Man in Paradise'.
In those days we believed that you’d be poisoned before you drowned because of the pollution in the river. There’s a hint of Jilted John, my one time neighbour, in the chorus of 'Calico Printer’s Clerk'. I now live in Sheffield and the River Don gets a mention in 'Jolly Grinder'. I know exactly where the barracks are in the song 'Glossop Road'. Pendleton, where my parents came from, gets a mention in 'The Returned Convict'. I studied Thomas Hardy’s 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' at school so the story of the 'Ten Shilling Wife' comes as no surprise.
Other songs tell the stories of working class heroes, including 'Bendigo',a prize fighter who became a Methodist preacher. 'Early One Morning', a folk classic, gets a new arrangement with a dark Christina Rossetti poem accompanying the story of the slighted maiden. I worked in the archives that held the story of the Manchester Exhibition of 1857. Sidney Ward’s satirical song 'Bonnie England', written in 1890, has a message for our times too.
It’s a great selection of popular songs from the past that have relevance today. It’s also an opportunity to learn and consider what was happening to the ordinary people in the nineteenth century. In the same way that writers like Ray Davies and Graham Gouldman were writing about dead end streets and bus stop romances in the 1960s, music hall performers and ballad singers were spreading the word and sharing the concerns of the working class nearly one hundred and fifty years ago.
Good tunes got recycled then, with new lyrics, and Harp & A Monkey have kept up that tradition.
The sleeve notes are fascinating too, illustrating the story of the famous Manchester moth, the peppered moth which evolved from white with grey speckles to dark grey in response to pollution and then back to white after the 1956 Clean Air Act.
The Victorian era is remembered as a time of discovery, invention, progress, education and self improvement, as well as a time of social deprivation and poverty and the political changes that sprang from suppression of the working classes. It wasn’t only the entomologists who tried to pin things down to understand them.
Harp & A Monkey have released these traditional tunes and stories to let them live and breathe again.
Track Listing:-
1
A Naked Man in Paradise
2
Calico Printr's Clerk
3
Jolly Grinder
4
Glossop Road
5
The Returned Convict
6
Ten Shilling Wife
7
Bendigo
8
Early One Morning
9
Victorians
10
Bonnie England
Band Links:-
https://www.facebook.com/Harpandamonke
http://www.harpandamonkey.com/
https://twitter.com/harpandamonkey
https://www.youtube.com/user/harpandam
https://plus.google.com/11152478335819