Joshua Burnell: Artist of the Month Interview

“I’m looking as we speak at a little board with lots of pins in it that has got all my songs stuck on it, trying to group them into various projects” Joshua Burnell, the Folk Radio Artist Of The Month for September, is informing me over the phone. His album ‘Flowers Where The Horses Sleep’ is receiving many gushing plaudits, including my own, but as with any artist in the Autumn of 2020, the future plans are clouded in uncertainty. “There’s one thing I started doing as a lockdown project, but it’s ended up just too close to this album, I can’t put this out now or it will just be confusing for everyone. It’s an acoustic-based EP with just four songs on it, so just based around acoustic guitar playing in open tunings. There is one song on there that is inspired by and is about Shelagh McDonald (read more about Joshua’s folk quest relating to Shelagh here). There’s another one called ‘Chase The Storm’ which is a kind of a fanciful adventure story which I won’t say anything about yet, I’ll wait until it’s out, but that’s in the pipeline.”

As an interviewer these days, the question about how he spent the lockdown months feels almost obligatory. “It’s been a bit of a mixed bag, to be honest, it’s probably followed a similar trend to what most other musicians have described that I’ve spoken to. At the start it was a very despairing time, all of the work was disappearing. The future was looking fairly bleak and everyone was saying “you want to be creative, everyone’s doing these live streams online” and I didn’t really have the appetite to do all that kind of thing with all the worries that were happening. It was a bit bleak but then I realised that I had the time and I’d better use it to the best of my abilities and so just did writing, I’ve spent a lot of the time writing new material which has been really good actually. You often think “oh I wish I had time to just sit and write” and suddenly you have six months of it to do just that.”

Having previously come to Folk Radio’s attention with his ambitious ‘Songs From The Seasons’ project, I was keen to learn how a set of wholly original material arrived. “The songs for the new album came together over a longer period of time” he explains. “It’s come at a bit of an interesting time for me creatively because I’ve been emerging from this album that’s all very traditional, I’ve been interpreting traditional songs in my own way for quite a while and so throughout the background of all that I’ve been writing my own songs. When the time came to put together another album of originals then I had a very sprawling collection of songs of different styles which could have made two or three different albums depending on the production. I had to make a decision so yeah, it was basically two or more years worth of songs which I had to decide what would fit together best with the kind of production I had in mind.”

With the strong emphasis on traditional re-interpretation being the main thing I had associated Burnell with up to now, I had to probe him further about one or two decidedly non-folk influences that had jumped out at me upon listening to the new album. Namely, he clearly has an ear for all things Prog and with those attention-grabbing visuals, I felt there was a nod to a certain Peter Gabriel? Luckily, he confirmed my theory as accurate. “I absolutely love early Genesis, a lot of the Prog Rock of that era gets laughed at because it did get a bit extreme with Emerson Lake & Palmer and the various things that they did, but I think there is something to be said for having a bit of flair to it, bringing a bit of theatre to it. To be honest, if you look at the mainstream stuff now, like Lady Gaga etc, well she’s perhaps not quite current scene now but you know, I like Billie Eilish. It’s very stylised, there’s a lot of costume, a lot of colour and I would say that that originates in early seventies Prog Rock. For me, I think “what would I like to see?” If I went to a show, that is exactly what I would want to see, so that’s what I give the people.”

He is also, during our chat, able to confirm that “there is a vinyl edition of ‘Flowers Where The Horses Sleep’ on the way in transparent yellow which is going to be really nice.” So, having apparently locked interests with a fellow vinyl enthusiast, I can’t resist enquiring about his recent collecting highlights. “I’ve got a number of crates in the living room, stacked up and ever-growing higher. I got Bob Dylan’s new album on special yellow vinyl, which I’m still getting into. Great lyrics, as ever, still not quite into it yet but I will be very soon, I think. I also got, very recently, Rick Wakeman’s new album, ‘The Red Planet’, which was a bit of a hilarious tale of trying to slim it down. You get this record with the sleeve and you open it up and this great big martian pops up with a Moog! I was also playing it at the wrong speed, so I listened to the whole thing and I realised; it sounded much better second time round! I used to like CDs but I’ve kind of polarised between vinyl and streaming. I don’t like downloads because it’s like buying something that you’ve got to keep somewhere but you don’t get the rest to look at. Streaming is so convenient, it’s a shame they don’t pay enough money but nevermind, you can’t change that. Vinyl for me is the ultimate way of listening because you get all that lovely visual presentation.”

Well, considering how impressed I was with the overall presentation of the latest release, I’d suggest the vinyl edition will be the one to own all you collectors reading this. I dug a little deeper on the song that the vivid cover art is based around. “‘Run With Me’ was kind of the song that kick-started the whole album. I must have written that two years ago and I kind of had that at the epicentre and I thought “which other songs can I pull in to work alongside that one?” I’d had this experience [locking eyes with the frightened doe] which was just a funny anecdote. So I went into work because I teach part-time at Fishergate Primary School, and I was recounting my tale to the teachers and TA’s there and Pete Kelly, one of the TA’s, said “oh there’s a song in that Josh, I expect you to write a song” so I thought “well I have to really” and I did. It came up so much better than I thought it would and I realised actually yeah, I need to keep this one.”

Joshua continues to outline the evolution in his activities that account for this latest shift in aesthetics. “The songs that I was working on [during ‘Songs For The Seasons’] didn’t make the cut. That project was very influenced by traditional music so a lot of the music I was writing whilst doing that was tunes. There were a couple of tunes that I wanted to have on this but for one reason or another, they just weren’t coming together with the rest of the album. They just stuck out like sore thumbs. Possibly because I was angling for a bit more of a contemporary sound with some of the other songs, it just felt that it didn’t work. So, there was original music written during that time but none of it particularly made it onto this album.” I noted too that genre boundaries don’t appear to be of much concern to Joshua, he seems pleased I spotted that. “What I’ve always tried to do is pick from as many genres and styles as appeal to me and write those songs and then try and piece them together. I think it’s worked this time around; I don’t try to constrain myself with any particular genre. I write the songs that I like which borrow from a range of styles and it is what it is. Luckily, I think it’s turned out pretty well.”

Undoubtedly an album highlight, as well as arguably Burnell’s most dynamic production ever, is ‘La Fay’, a piece that saw me summon up comparisons to Kate Bush in my review. “‘La Fay’ was definitely a kind of production starting point. To be honest, that was a very late addition to the album, we’d almost got it all done and there was another track that was meant to be in its place called ‘Hidden In The Small Print’, which was a bit of a John Martyn type thing. It wasn’t particularly strong, and it was nagging at me and I thought “you know what? I just want to do a song that feels 100% me that doesn’t have any preconceptions about trying to fit in with this, that or the other”. I just wanted it to be a solid Pop-Rock song with supernatural elements in there. It started with that production, that feel, that piano loop and a drum loop. I was looking around for a story and I’d been listening to a lot of podcasts at the time, quite a few on witchcraft for one reason or another. Morgan La Fay is the ultimate figure for witchcraft so I just started researching and it all came together.”

In terms of recording methods, Joshua tells me it is all “very much pieced together [one instrument at a time] but looking forward, we would absolutely love to get together in the studio and do an album the old fashioned way. Get the rhythm section together and rehearse it first. But with this album, because it was a return to my original songwriting and the songs weren’t in the sets live, at all, we didn’t really have time to run them through. So, this album was a question of piecing it together.”

Let none of this lead you to think that the Folksiness in Joshua’s work has disappeared this time around. He tells me passionately of how he discovered Folk Music when he “moved back to the UK from having lived in France. I came to do my A levels and me, and the other cool friends I had at the time, went around the pubs going to folk sessions and I absolutely fell in love with it immediately. The energy and the community and just the sound of the music. I had some friends who would go to the Whitby Folk Week every year and I tagged along with them the one time and it completely opened my eyes to the scene. I knew it was a scene I wanted to get more involved in and over the years I went to more gigs, listened to more music, went to festival and it must have seeped into my music enough because when I did ‘Into The Green’, which was kind of meant to be Prog Rock centred but there are a lot of folk stylings in that, which perked up the attention of the folk world and I ended up on some folk festival bills. I thought ‘this is a scene I want to get more into’”.

That storytelling tradition is alive and well on ‘Flowers Where The Horses Sleep’. Joshua recalls how Mark Jeffrey came to his attention from his mother-in-law. “She had this book and said, “oh you’ve got to write a song about this”. I’ve got family connections with Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. On the Island of the Dead in Tasmania, there is a museum where they talk about Mark Jeffrey because he worked there for a little bit. There’s this whole book that’s from the Victorian times that supposedly is his autobiography, I doubt he actually wrote it, I think they just put his name on it. I read it and it’s quite a hard read because it’s very oldy-worldy, but the stuff he got up to was completely outlandish, he was an outrageous character who was given 1001 second chances and every single time he completely blew it. He kept beating people up, he just couldn’t help himself, he seemed like he was addicted to it. He got into more and more trouble and I just thought absolutely, this guy has to have a song. When I got to the end of the book and he just ends up on the Island Of The Dead digging graves and then comes face to face with the devil. You couldn’t make it up!”

On the other end of the storytelling scale, however, is a song of such futuristic scope that it recalls Neil Young on ‘After The Gold Rush’. “The sci-fi element is definitely creeping into ‘Look At Us Now’, I always imagined it to look like those early eighties sci-fi books that you find in charity shops with those gorgeous paintings on, that’s how I kind of imagine that song to look. It’s kind of sci-fi but then also looking forward to what might genuinely happen one day. The same kind of idea that’s in the song about Mark Jeffrey’s, transporting criminals to a place where you don’t want them anymore, so in Victorian times that was Australia (which now would be a treat for anyone) but looking forward the idea is that everyone is on Mars and the prisoners are sent back to planet Earth which has now become baron and destroyed by climate change. The prisoners who are on that ship in the song know of tales of this wonderful blue planet but when they see it it’s face it’s now a sort of yellow and they realise they are going to die there. At the end of the song, they’re all screaming ‘don’t take us in’ and it gets very dramatic.”

As far as where these interests come from, Joshua confesses “I don’t read as much as I should do, I’ve been into Netflix which I know doesn’t sound as culturally highbrow as it should. The things I’ve really enjoyed have been the sci-fi, supernatural programmes, kind of like ‘Look At Us Now’ I suppose. I think at the moment everyone’s a little bit worried about the world ending and as a result, there are so many songs, albums, TV shows, TV series about various apocalyptic scenarios. I love them, I love a good apocalypse story.”

What with his love of Prog and my own comparisons to certain classic eras in record-making, I enquire Joshua a little further about his relationship with that time in music? Does he find modern music lacking a certain analogue charm? “There are so many bands that actively look at the late sixties, early seventies, find that same gear and use it. So, I think there is modern music that does sound just as good [as that era], it’s just the mainstream stuff perhaps doesn’t. I think the reason is because they have to take so much care of using analogue gear that when you get that right, you get the character of those machines and that tape, the desk. For example, the new album, Ed, who recorded and mixed it, he loved all that old retro gear and he made sure everything ran through a tape emulator, although it crackles it doesn’t detract from the sound but it just adds a warmth.”

There is one particular legendary name from that era with whom Joshua did make a personal connection, as well as receive some invaluable advice. “Julie Felix, bless her” he remembers fondly, “I did a concert with her shortly before she sadly died, a poignant moment. I’m really, really lucky to have done that with her, she’s such a genuine lovely lady. She just said, “make sure you always do what you want to do”. Which sounds obvious, but it’s a really good message to take away. We had a few discussions about the hardships of touring, musicians always like to have a good whinge when they get together. It was so comforting to hear her describing all the same kinds of things that I struggle with as well, she just said: “you’ve got to stick to your guns, make sure you do just what you want to do and if not don’t do it”. I thought ‘you know what? Julie, you’re right. I’m going to take that moving forward’”.

Shamelessly, I couldn’t resist using the Folk Radio platform to try a bit of musical matchmaking. So, I asked if there was anyone he’d like to reach out to through these pages? “I’ve always wanted to do a song or collaboration with Maddy Prior at some stage. I was emailing about her singing on ‘Joan Of The Greenwood’, I sent it over to her and literally, Covid19 just swept in there and obviously, I thought it’s not worth pursuing this. Also, Jon Boden, I’ve always really enjoyed what he’s done. We played at Butlins for the Great British Folk Festival, people came up to us afterwards and said, “it reminded us of Jon Boden, some of the things he was doing”. I know that he’s very, dare to say, influenced by Bowie. The ‘Afterglow’ album, there was a bit of a Bowie sound there and I’m very into my Bowie as well so there’s definitely some common ground going on here.” Well…. watch this space!

And so, finally, we are back to the future; specifically, what it has in store for Joshua in these uncertain times. “So much has changed, if you’d asked me six months ago I’d have been like “yes, we’re going to be playing festivals all the time and touring Europe”, now it’s just if the world will be able to return to normal within that time frame. I suppose so much depends on whether we get a vaccine or not. I hope I could say with confidence we’ll be touring the world on a regular basis. I’ve been trying to reschedule my tour that wasn’t able to go ahead for Spring 2021, obviously, it completely depends on whether the venues are still around because a lot of them are emailing me back saying “yes if we’ve not gone bust”. I hope to be able to announce it in the next month or so yes, keep your eyes peeled and hopefully, we’ll be arranging something soon.”