On St. David’s Day, Paul Armfield shares a song and print from his new project “Domestic” (help support its release here). Each song includes a linocut of a plant considered native to the UK. As today is St. David’s Day, it seemed appropriate that we share this one of the Daffodil. Flagbearers is also our Song of the Day.
Paul Armfield:
This is the first of a series of 8 linocut prints that I am producing to accompany my soon to be released collection of songs’ Domestic’. Each of the prints features a plant considered native to the UK and corresponding to each letter of the album’s title, hence ‘D’ for Daffodil, ‘O’ for oak etc.
When writing the songs for this album, as often happens, a theme starts to emerge, unintentional and unnoticed at first but becoming apparent as the body of work builds. One of the reasons I love working in song is that ideas can evolve quite organically without deliberation, intent or predesign. The melody, harmony and rhythms suggests how words might sound (what Keith Richards calls ‘good vowel movement’) and from these sounds, actual words appear which evolve into phrases and then sense and meaning start to form. As the title of the album suggests, the concept of ‘home’ was the thread that seemed to emerge as a leitmotiv: place, warmth, shelter, belonging, allegiance.
In hindsight it seems fairly obvious as to why this would be the case, I had recently given up my job as an Arts Centre manager and for the first time in several years I was spending more than a few hours at home, in fact, days and weeks seemed to pass with no real need to go outside. My children had both left home to study, my wife at work; for most of the time, it was just me and the four walls of my house. It felt like hibernation, sanctuary from a world torn apart and gone mad with talk of migrants, refugees, Brexit and all that malarky.
For selfish reasons I didn’t want Brexit, my musical career has been based primarily in mainland Europe for the past 15 years or more, the fact that this record was recorded in Stuttgart with a trans-European line-up of musicians is testament to that. I cherish the freedom to work and travel there, why would anyone vote for a life with unnecessary borders and restrictions? Yet I live on the Isle of Wight, I am by definition insular and I love the isolation, I love that stretch of water that acts as a barrier between me and the rest of the UK; does this make me a hypocrite?
I don’t feel like a hypocrite, and as the songs for this album appeared the expansive definition of ‘home’ was revealed, it is the four walls and a roof where I live, it is my family, my Island, and yes, it is the nation where I live and was born: my ‘homeland’, but if I were travelling back from further afield Europe would also feel like home, and to stretch the idea further, to the astronauts returning from space, anywhere on the planet would feel like home.
I spoke about this with the musicians I was working with and was surprised to learn that the Italians and French have no word for ‘home’ as we understand it, only house. I’m not sure of the significance of this, but it got me thinking, if you were to pick up my house and drop it in the middle of Africa would it still be ‘home’? I think it would, my sense of belonging is as portable as I am.
And so back to that Daffodil. It crops up in ‘Flagbearers’ one of the songs from the album:
The Rose, the thistle, the shamrock, the daffodil
Borne on the wind across mountain and ocean
Until self-seeding randomly, thriving untended
Native by accident, falling where happenstance falls
We are all of us strangers
As with the other ‘native’ plants that will illustrate the record, daffodils are unlikely to be endemic to the UK. The truth is that the national flower of Wales is thought to have been introduced to the UK by the Romans from the meadows and woods of southern Europe, even its Welsh sounding name is likely to be a variant of the Greek’ asphodelos’. Daffodils are about as Welsh as penguins, with penguin being the most conspicuous word of Welsh origin in regular use in the English language, a result of mass Welsh migration to Patagonia.
We are all of us strangers.
You can help support the release of Paul’s album via Crowdfunder which includes some great incentivising rewards: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/domestic-album-fundraiser
Photo credit Alice Armfield