Murder, and the Birds is the latest offering from David A Jaycock, out now on Triassic Tusk Records – including on lovely vinyl (get your copy here).
Jaycock was inspired to create this beautiful album of eccentric English folk after finding a book of traditional songs, Ballads and Songs of Lancashire (1865), and falling down the rabbit holes of the old stories written within.
In his review of the album, Folk Radio’s Thomas Blake described Jaycock as something of an outlier, his music skirting the periphery of traditional folk, hauntology and the whimsy of 1970s English baroque pop. Too conceptual to be trad, too tuneful to be avant-garde, his is a music of edgelands, situated somewhere between David Tibet and Robyn Hitchcock.
Watch his latest video for All My Trials, a song that hails from Warwickshire and is also our Song of the Day:
David on ‘Murder, and the Birds’:
“I was missing home but I’m never sure where that is? It is probably both the Northwest and the Southwest. I’d come back to Cornwall for the last nine years and so Lancashire loomed red in my thoughts. I didn’t know enough about the place. I had neglected the thought of it. Different light, too cold, Jobbies in Glodwick swimming pool, Victorian nightmares and the Wednesday ‘flea’ market.
“And at the same time, love. Of my adolescent memories and deadly rooftop adventures. Sweet peanuts and fireworks in the snow. ‘We come a cob a coalin’ for bonfire night’ you know, stuff like that. I decided to find some old songs or stories from Lancashire to work on. I found an old red book called Ballads and Songs of Lancashire (1865) by John Haland with even older verse than I had hoped for. It contained no music, but the verses interested me enough to carry on. I found five songs in there. I needed more so I looked back to the South West.
“Then, as with most concepts, I started to squeeze square pegs into round holes, and so I began to find songs from other places that were of more interest to me. Songs about death, incest, murder, and the birds.
“And so the Midlands, Ayrshire and Cambridge became detours for Lancashire and the West. Reading through each verse or song I began to edit the gender specific roles where possible. I also played with hero and villain sentiment. Some ballads were just too long and so were ruthlessly chopped. Anything about virgin maids or royal worship was instantly cut. I experimented with the odd chorus too. Original thoughts on vocals were dense with many different singers.
“Original thoughts on instrumentation were traditional. Both of these ideas changed over the course. String parts written on synths stayed and I finally got some sounds I liked out of my FM synths as well as the usual analogue ones. I double tracked most of the vocals and stereo recorded the guitars and just to add to the duplicity of everything, the whole process took around two years from the initial sketches to finished songs.
“This record has helped me come to terms with my ongoing ambiguities with regards to place. And place, I have learned, is not a fixed commodity. It fluctuates with time and memory”.
Jaycock has previously recorded with James Yorkston, and Yorkston has called him ‘a great English outsider.’ That is the perfect little phrase, really. His music exists both inside and outside of the English tradition. The undeniably beautiful songs of Murder, And The Birds relish the ugly and the odd, and aren’t afraid to document the violence of our history. Jaycock is a master of carefully managed contradictions and a true original.
Thomas Blake
https://triassictusk.bandcamp.com/album/murder-and-the-birds