Seth Lakeman – The Well Worn Path
Cooking Vinyl – 26 October 2018
Not that I suspect it causes him many sleepless nights, but, nevertheless, it beggars belief that not only was Seth Lakeman‘s stupendous last album, Ballads of the Broken Few, not even nominated in the Radio 2 Folk Awards but, save for Solomon Browne as Best Song in 2009, Lakeman’s not been nominated in any category since winning Folk Singer of the Year and Best Album for Freedom Fields back in 2007.
Whether The Well Worn Path, his ninth album, will see a turn of the tide only time will tell, but, recorded in a break from touring with Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters earlier this year, it’s yet another stunning piece of work and, as ever, rooted in his native Dartmoor.
Produced by Ben Hillier and featuring his new four-piece band of veteran collaborator Ben Nicholls on bass, drummer Evan Jenkins, Kit Hawes on guitars and sister-in-law Kathryn Roberts providing backing vocals, it marks what he describes as more of a prog-rock approach to his formative sound.
The power and intensity are in evidence from the start (as are Plant influences) with the steadily building, ominous and brooding rhythms of Bright Smile, a nautically-set bittersweet song about a sailor haunted by memories of lost love.
Richard Thompson is a regularly trotted out comparison, and, Roberts providing the Linda harmonies, the slow march rock She Never Blamed Him affords it another outing, Lakeman’s fiddle substituting for the Thompson guitar solos on a downbeat tragic tale of love fading with age and “beauty’s blighted bloom” that ends “cold and lifeless on the ground.”
The first of two five-minute story songs based around West Country figures, built around Billy Bragg-like sparse and slightly distorted guitar and a tune that sounds like a slower Free Electric Band, Educated Man is essentially Lakeman’s Dead Poets Society, a salute to inspirational mentors. Specifically, it concerns Tommy, a caravan-dwelling “earnest lay professor, out of time and out of place”, who took him under his wing and sparked his questioning mind and thirst for knowledge. “‘A word is like a jewel’, he’d say, ‘Read everything you can’”, recalls Lakeman, before he moved on, leaving behind, according to the song, a pile of books and note saying “the rest is up to you”, Lakeman continuing his learning in school of life for, “where wonder never dies, there lies an educated man.”
The second has more historic basis, the pulsing, fiddle scraping Fitzsimmons’ Fight being an account of the 14 round, two-hour, bare-knuckle bout in 1847 between Helston-born Cornish heavyweight boxer and the reigning world champion, “Gentleman” Jim Corbett, felling him with a blow to the body that was dubbed the ‘solar plexus’ punch and became part of boxing folklore.
Cohen (and specifically Hallelujah) provides the musical inspiration for Lend A Hand, a call for unity as, backed by Roberts’ harmonies and a simple fiddle phrase before drums and tambourine lead into a slow march, the chorus declares “Carry your burdens as far as you can/A change only comes when we all lend a hand.”
There are two rousing numbers that let loose his rocking side, Jenkins’ drums and Hawes’ fingerpicked guitar raising glass to the carousing any excuse will do Drink ’Til I’m Dry while, another call for unity (“Those of us who took the train/Will bear out the coming storm”), Divided We Will Fall is all rollicking folk rockabilly.
In contrast, stalked by glowering electric guitar and bass drum, the musically claustrophobic Judge Not A Man has a sepulchral, doomy tone to accompany its message about not judging a book by its cover, or, in this case, a man by the coat that he wears “For there’s many true hearts beneath rags that are beating.”
The track also contains the line, “Let those who have wealth help the starving and struggling”, and, unusually for Lakeman, there’s a strong political (with a small p) thread, both indirect and direct, woven through the album, no more so than on the equally muscular, bluesy and organ-backed Swiftian satire Dig New Ground in which unions refuse pay rises and the bosses distribute their profits to the poor as “They moved among the dole queues, boarded every bus/With streaming eyes and heartfelt cries, you’ll need it more than us” while pigs fly overhead.
Those who, on the other hand, prefer the more wistful Lakeman should be directed to The Gloaming where, backed by bowed bass and muted fiddle, he uses the old Scottish term for the time between sunset and nightfall as a metaphor for the fading of love. And, likewise, the title track closer with its pulsating fiddle reverb and tumbling drumfalls, which, echoing poets like Emerson, Thoreau and Wordsworth, muses on mortality and the peace that comes with solitude in nature with its dark wilds and the stillness of night that “hold communion to the depths of time.”
Lakeman may tread well-worn paths, but this is definitely a case where familiarity breeds content.
Renowned for his barn-storming live shows, Seth will tour the UK in November:
Wed 14 Nov – GLOUCESTER Guildhall
Thu 15 Nov – WOLVERHAMPTON Slade Rooms
Fri 16 Nov – LEEDS Brudenell Social Rooms
Sat 17 Nov – HOLMFIRTH Picturedrome
Sun 18 Nov – CARDIFF Tramshed
Mon 19 Nov – LONDON Islington Assembly Hall
Tue 20 Nov – PORTSMOUTH Wedgewood Rooms
Wed 21 Nov – CAMBRIDGE Junction
Thu 22 Nov – FROME Cheese & Grain
Fri 23 Nov – LEAMINGTON SPA Assembly
Sat 24 Nov – FALMOUTH Princess Pavilion
Order The Well Worn Path via Amazon