Frankie Armstrong & Friends – Cats of Coven Lawn
GF*M Records/ Pirate Jenny Records – 22 January 2021
Over the last year, talk of ‘key workers’ and ‘essential services’ has dominated newspapers and workplaces, and we have had to call into question what exactly we mean by those terms. Is art less essential than money or food? Do human beings have primary and secondary needs, or a broader spectrum, and if so where on that spectrum does music fall? And when we talk about ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ are we really grading our needs in order of importance or merely in the chronological order in which they must occur? These are questions of philosophy, but they concern art, and art has a right to fight its corner. For those who value artistic practice, James Oppenheim’s 1911 poem Bread And Roses (taken from a slogan used by the Chicago Women Trade Unionists) makes a stirring case for the defence.
Even in the hardest of times, the slogan implies, people feel compelled to make art. There appears to be a deep, perhaps causal link between the need to exist and the need to find beauty or enjoyment in existence. The latter makes the former worthwhile. Even in times of war, famine or genocide the most downtrodden social groups relied on the promise of something better to get them through, and one of the easiest and most satisfying ways of doing this was song, either communally or in isolation.
All this is really a roundabout way of saying a very simple thing: don’t underestimate the power of music as an important, perhaps even essential, part of life.
The singer, writer and voice teacher Frankie Armstrong, who turned 80 earlier this month, says it much better and much more succinctly. It is no accident that her new album – a release characterised by variation, experimentation and breadth of collaboration – kicks off with a version of that century-old Oppenheim text. It’s been performed countless times before in aid of countless causes, but rarely can it have been done as stirringly as this communal a capella version.
Bread And Roses is one of a handful of overtly political songs on Cats Of Coven Lawn. We Are Women strikes a similar tone, its lyrics adapted from a text by noted American ecofeminist Susan Griffin and sung unaccompanied by Armstrong. Where I Live On The Map examines the nature of privilege by collating heartbreaking examples of water poverty, while the brief but powerful Story Of Strength tells the story of activist Malala Yousafzai with words adapted by collaborator Laura Bradshaw from Malala’s own writing.
There are more lighthearted moments: the title track is a brilliantly bizarre take on an obscure traditional song arranged by Ben Webb (AKA Jinnwoo, whose idea it was for Armstrong to record this album). It’s borne along on a lo-fi acoustic guitar strum and is augmented by Armstrong’s ‘meow chorus’, giving the whole thing an air of naivety that aligns it with the outsider art movement. Dead Funny (written by Brian Pearson who, along with Armstrong, was at one point a member of the influential Critics Group) is gallows humour at its jauntiest. Pearson also contributes Four Seasons, a song written in the 80s for a collaboration with Armstrong based on the ballad Tam Lin, and provided the words for Earth, Air, Fire And Water, which has an instrumental outro that hints at paganism, ritual practice and the lysergic delights of freak-folk.
But what is really impressive is how, after more than sixty years in the music business, Armstrong still refuses to be pigeonholed. Hers is a lo-fi aesthetic, and she was doing it long before that term was ever used. It’s obvious that she has little time for folk’s stuffier conventions and even less time for the overt slickness of much contemporary music. If she does have an agenda it is the championing of the underdog.
Neither does she care much for the usual forms of authorship or the cult of the individual. Her music is a collaborative process – the album is credited to Frankie Armstrong and Friends, and a number of lead vocal parts are taken by other singers. Armstrong’s own Bread And Roses singing trio featuring Pauline Down and Laura Bradshaw take on the majority of the singing, and there are supporting roles for the aforementioned Pearson and Webb as well as the Bird In The Belly ensemble and Martin Simpson. This gives the whole thing a refreshingly uncontrived feel and a heightened sense of unity, in terms of both friendship and political comradeship, an approach that bears fruit in the harmonies of Something Sings, or the delightfully rousing Yoiks (a pair of folk songs from the Sami culture), or Aide Jano (Idiano), a lusty Serbian song about the pleasures of dancing.
Perhaps best of all though are two traditional English songs: incest ballad Lizzie Wan (ft. Martin Simpson and premiered below), given a bleak but moving vocal performance that resembles an English Nico, and a tender rendition of Willow Song, which will be familiar to many listeners as Desdemona’s lament from Othello. They’re given a run for their money by the Ben Webb composition Marcy’s Guesthouse, which perfectly captures the British seaside town out of season, locked in time, sad and wistful, empty but somehow beautiful.
Frankie Armstrong’s music has always been defined by a staunchly positive outlook, though one which is never rose-tinted. Adversity – death, the world’s political problems, her own visual impairment – is confronted head-on, and with admirable practicality. For her, music is both a tool for changing the world and something to be enjoyed after the world has changed. This all-encompassing, compassionate worldview has served her well for over half a century, and Cats Of Coven Lawn is one of her strongest statements yet. It is also a brilliant testament to the essential nature of artistic expression.
Premiere: Lizzie Wan
Frankie Armstrong: “Some story songs (ballads), like Shakespeare’s plays, speak so strongly down the ages. and though this may be centuries old this song talks of emotions, fear, passion, shame, remorse, and grief, that are surely still with us. The old songs can be less timid, they can look such furores in the face and turn them into powerful poetry. And who better than Martin Simpson to play on a song with such a range of feelings, he is a master both in his own right and as an incomparable accompanist.”
Cats of Coven Lawn is released on January 22nd 2021and is available to pre-order now via Amazon here.
Website: http://frankiearmstrong.com/