Last week saw the release of ‘Enclosure’, the new album from The Askew Sisters who are also our Artists of the Month. Below you can watch their new video for ‘I Wandered by the Brookside’ which was filmed at Wilton’s Music Hall by Eric Revill-Dews of Bigger Boat film. In his review of the album (read it here), Thomas Blake described the song as a “brilliant evocation of the human ability to exist completely in a landscape and completely within oneself simultaneously” He adds “It is a beautiful but uneasy song, made even more so by the contrast between Hazel’s clear, high singing and Emily’s mournful and dignified cello.”
Hazel shared some insight into the song:
“I was searching through some online archives from the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library when I stumbled upon this old traditional text collected from Leah Serman of Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire circa 1916 by Alfred Williams. Most old folk songs have a strong sense of narrative, but the openness and ambiguity in these words immediately captivated me and a tune pretty much wrote itself straight away. I love the way that there is this unease and tension throughout the song that comes to some kind of resolution. I changed one line that pulled the song towards a more conventional romantic narrative and sent a rough version to some friends, as I was curious as to how people might interpret it. Everyone came back to me with a different perspective on it, which was great! You don’t often get such a range of wildly different narrative readings with traditional songs.
“Looking in to the history of the song a bit more, I recognised it from a setting that is often sung in folk clubs to a tune written by Barbara Berry (which Eva Cassidy covered), and has a completely different feel, but it seems that the words might have originally come from a poem by Lord Haughton and entered the oral folk tradition.
“I’d been experimenting with using the melodeon in ways that didn’t sound like a melodeon and had come up with a riff where left hand chords blur into each other, I played this to Emily and she straight away came up with a cello pizzicato part that made the whole song fall into place.
“We really love singing this at gigs and often started our performances with it on our launch tour. I also enjoy changing my mind about what’s happening in the song. I most recently have been thinking about our disconnection with the natural word and how so many of us have lost touch with it and know so much less about it than previous generations. But sometimes I just think it’s about some kind of personal revelation or cathartic journey.”
Enclosure is out now via Oakemere Music. Order via The Askew Sisters website: http://www.askewsisters.co.uk/pages/site/albums.htm
Upcoming Tour Dates
26-27 May – Chester Folk Festival, Chester
07 Jun – Wimborne Minster Folk Festival, Wimborne, Dorset
19-21 Jul – Creative English Music and Song Weekend Course, Halsway Manor, Somerset
20 Jul – Halsway Manor, nr Taunton, Somerset
02 Aug – Sidmouth Folk Festival, Sidmouth, Devon
30 Aug – Lyme Folk Weekend, Lyme Regis, Dorset
Photo Credit: Elly Lucas