Modern Hinterland – The Hoppings
Fandango – 21 September 2018
Adopting the title of his last album for his new band project, inspired by journeys throughout the UK and a year of listening to an album a day, The Hoppings finds sandy-voiced Newcastle-born Chris Hornsby joined by Canadian drummer Colin Marshall and Welsh bassist Tim Thackray.
I’m not going to attempt to pinpoint a year’s worth of possible influences, but I can indicate some of the map references. Things head down the A1 to meet the equally sprightly acoustic strum memories of a one day romance with The Girl Just South of Hackney, then, on the back of a tumbling melody and drums, it’s over to York and another stroll down memory lane and images of “that sweet shop, down the twisted listing lane, with the ill-judged fudge sign”, the clock striking midnight on New Year’s Eve and thinking “of little else, just of our sweet selves.”
There’s more romantic nostalgia to be found north of the border to meet with the emblematic Lowland’s Daughter, “a girl, deep in curls”, on Edinburgh’s Abbey Strand, harmonica leading into a walking beat rhythm with clopping percussion, but with the cautionary note not to ever think you can buy your way into their siren hearts.
He’s less specific elsewhere, but the ghosts of the past still haunt the songs. The mid-tempo (Thompsonesque) folk-rock tinged I Know Everybody That Lives Around Here wanders the neighbourhood pointing out the likes of Bill the Baptist, “In his beard the last of the split pea soup”, the “two old Taxis sitting by the bar/Frenemies outside their cars”, Jim with his limp and a wife that ran off , all trapped in a Groundhog Day. “I don’t know anyone with a better deal”, he sings somewhere between resignation and serenity.
Then there’s Inevitable which talks of one of the Gallaghers on the jukebox and his first home, of avoiding a girl he’d had a crush on at school, the “clowns and fools” and “the first time, I’d known a lack of doubt”, being struck by a face from the past “looking like you’d seen a ghost/Or someone you like the most.”
There’s a hint of a dabbling with certain substances as he sings about “lying to what friends I had/Saying ‘ah you know this is just something to stop me feeling sad’” that suggests an earlier reference to “our first dose” might have other connotations, but it’s not something picked up in the other songs. What does seem constant, however, is a sense of regret, loss, lack of self-esteem and being stuck in a downward spiral, whether on the REM-ish circling guitars of Empty Mess (“Don’t be fooled by this idiot grin…This whole world is shaving me thin”) where “It’s easy with a second look/To see which turns I should have/And which I should not have took” or on the slow waltzing Begging For Your Help where again, confronted with the possibility of romantic salvation, he wishes “I could speak in words so true/To convince a girl like you/Of my love for you/That’s what I’d do” but “my tongue is thick with thought/And I second guess myself.”
It’s an image that also appears in the album’s opener, Jemima with its harmonica wailing intro and Hornsby sounding a little like Al Stewart circa Time Passages, where he sings “as always I said nothing/Tongue-tied by thoughts too wide/How do you express that feeling/Without it being misunderstood?” Even on the Proclaimers-ish Mothers Day with its bouncy singalong chorus , he sings about “a cold wind gently blowing/Across your window sill/where the white paint’s started to peel/(Yeah I know how that feels!).”
And yet, at the end of the day there’s also resolve here in the lines “I say to grant yourself freedom…just take what you need/And burn all the rest.” Which, I guess, brings me to the kind of title track, the jaunty, whistle-along Take You To The Hoppings (To Do Wrong), is a reference to an annual summer fairground on Newcastle Town Moor every summer and getting up to a bit of adolescent mischief with your girlfriend or mates when you’re sixteen or so and can’t bluff your way into a pub. While the album may, as a whole, be hung with the shadows of adult life, there’s something here about the blissful innocence of childhood and a future yet unmapped, when the moon will be shining and hearts opening, when “we’ll buy one drink and share it/And wonder where this stops.” Sure what people sing is “not the truth of anything… not what life brings”, but if there’s anything the album teaches, it’s that “the song that we will sing is the sweetest of sins.” Drink from the bottle now, there’s life ahead for the hangover.
The Hoppings is out 21 September 2018 on Label Fandango.