Conchie – Northumbria
Independent – Out Now
“When you’ve been broken so completely …
That you can’t remember who you are …
How do you remember who you were?”
Approaching this album with no preconceptions of what music should sound like in our 21st-century digital world, or firm ideas on what constitutes ideal album sequencing will pay dividends here. Northumbria, the 8 song, 22-minute long debut release from ConChie is an album of antitheses, think the darkest of subject matter and the most uplifting of acoustic guitar tunes, but even then you are still only scratching the surface. An intensely rewarding listen with some captivating guitar playing, its context and evolution warrant serious explanation.
Escaping the hell of having lived eight years through someone else’s alcoholism and someone else’s abuse, ConChie presents with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a variant of PTSD, although, as he makes clear, this is not an album about Domestic Abuse, rather it is an ultimately joyous exploration of the redemptive power of human capacity to endure, the ability to survive though self-reconstruction and reclamation, together with the potency of home, family and love.
The path to this album’s release was not easy, not least because it appears that having gained his freedom from the abusive relationship, at the outset he actually “didn’t set out to make anything”. Progress on this rehabilitation pathway was time-consuming, with each step proving difficult and challenging. Was he physically able to play guitar again after eight years, notwithstanding the obvious practical limitation that whilst he may have escaped the abusive relationship his musical gear didn’t, and even if he could, did he want to? Could he still write, could he still record, could he “finish something and put a full stop on it?”
Origin(al) Stories, a section of ConChie’s blog, available here, tells the origin story of Northumbria – hence the title, and tracks the progress of what became a project, from his first picking up a guitar again to the album’s release, “although it’s not the whole story, it’s postcards from the journey”. Reading this in conjunction with listening to the music cannot be recommended enough.
Recorded in an old barn in the North-East of England, Conchie was the only musician involved, playing and engineering everything himself. With one Martin OM-28 acoustic guitar, thanks to Mark De Neys at Westside Distribution, an old Cooper’s tea-chest for percussion, this ADA, After Domestic Abuse, recording was completed using a single microphone loaned by a friend and an analogue four-track TEAC reel-to-reel tape recorder that had belonged to his Father in the 1970s. Additional field recordings, including spoken voices, conversation snippets, street and sea sounds were captured on an old Sony Walkman.
Working exclusively in altered tunings, one of the new areas explored during his recent journey, the finished result is musically evocative, displaying elegance and charm, at times thought-provoking, challenging even, (a good thing), each listen offers up new horizons and vistas for those with receptive ears and minds.
Opening with a composite sound-scape track of field recordings entitled Endings immediately confounds the ‘normal’, as does having Beginning as the penultimate offering, however as the sound of the wind dissipates, the final words “But I was looking for a place that I could call home”, is an effective device for emphasising one of the album’s themes.
The two instrumentals which follow are diverse in character, each with their own particular attraction and appeal. No Sailor Leaves the Sea is upbeat and bright with an insistent percussive beat, whilst in contrast Peter’s Fields is a gentle, almost bucolic, pastoral evocation of Albion. A wonderful tune on which ConChie certainly got the most out of the four tracks available. For those looking for musical touchstones I would suggest that early John Renbourne, Bert Jansch, possibly Dave Evans, might have been influences. The brief In Sunshine’s Shadow is, ostensibly, also an instrumental, with vocalised sounds accompanying the finger-picking. Whilst not celestial, to these ears they do evoke some sense of the arcane.
Two tracks with vocals follow; the bleaker side of the album alluded to in the introductory paragraph. The lyrics to The Sense of an Ending make for difficult listening, but in the context of what ConChie has suffered then for those of us who have no personal experience and can only empathise that is a small and necessary price to pay. One would have to carved from granite to not be moved by this song, although the inadequacy of that single word does a gross injustice, indeed is an insult to the plaintive
I’m at the end of my rope
I’m at the end of my hope
I’ve had enough…
Daddy will always love you, my girls
Mummy’s bottle is her world.
Musically this is such a strong track too, stylish in the extreme, in the manner of Nick Drake, with great harmonies too.
I Know What You Are painfully exposes the manner in which abusers and addicts are adept at hiding their true faces on first meetings and the way that their insidious, toxic behaviours first hijack and then corrupt the abusee, manipulating the latter over time to question their own reality. My reading is, however, that the song is positive in outlook, the abuser has been found out and their corrosiveness exposed, initially to the abusee, but now, the world.
So you can shove your house in Ranmoor (an affluent suburb of Sheffield)
And you can shove your trophy car
You can pretend to those who don’t know you
But I know what you are
Again, the guitar work is imposing, and the overall sound expansive, all the more impressive considering the recording technology being employed. The effects on the vocals, I would like to say ‘slightly distorted’, but that has negative connotations and that is not my intention, work too.
The final piece This Green and Pleasant Land is a delightfully serene re-working of Sir Hubert Parry‘s composition for Blake’s poem, although fancifully, but possibly appropriately, I would like to think that, given ConChie’s recent life-history there is more than a nod also to Ayisha Malik‘s 2019 life-affirming novel of the same name.
The brief spoken word clips often involving the voice of a child, words from nursery rhymes and snippets of descriptions of examples of abusive behaviour which come at end of tracks will not be for all, however, these are elements that help to make up the ‘whole’ that is the album. Further elements include credits due to Sandman and Andy H, for reasons which are explained in the blog.
This album is truly authentic, it both connects and communicates with a brutal honesty and warrants investigation. I, for one, look forward to future music from ConChie, and, if and when he is ready, a return to collaborations too.
Northumberland is out now on all streaming platforms.
More details here: https://drawuptapdown.wixsite.com/conchie
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