Quarterman – Carondelet
Wood Head Records – 26 March 2021
Lead singer with Man The Lifeboats, Carondelet is Richard James Quarterman’s first solo project, a collection of more introspective songs addressing themes of love, loss and longing that draw inspiration from the likes of Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Richard Thompson, Tom Waits and, I’d venture, Willie Nelson, his acoustic guitar, bolstered here and there with drums, pedal steel and strings.
It’s Dylan who provides the impetus for the opening mid-tempo balladry of That Old Chinese Takeaway Called Happiness, the melody echoing I Shall Be Released on a song about the beginning of a new relationship and inspired by an actual North London takeaway of that name. Featuring harmonica and producer Jamie Evans on ukulele, the chimingly anthemic Outsiders is a strummed protest song about not responding to persecution and repression not with violence but with kindness (“they can take our lives but they’ll never take our kindness”), while returning to personal matters of the heart, combining the end of several relationships into the pastoral folk Bonnie’s tale of a summer romance.
By contrast, initially sung unaccompanied save for the sound effect of waves before piano and harmonium drone arrives, O Fisherman, inspired by an Italian folk song and the 2015 migrant crisis, returns to the political in addressing the all too frequent tragedies of asylum seekers being drowned at sea in the Mediterranean.
One of three tracks passing the six-minute mark, the 60s styled troubadour folk-blues Kings Cross Baby is a boy meets girl, East meets West love story, fingerpicked on classical acoustic guitar and augmented by hurdy-gurdy, strings, piano chords and the sound of a crackling fire. Then, edging towards seven minutes, comes The Caledonian, originally destined as a band anthem, but finally resolving as a ukulele and double bass sway-along about a fictional London pub but true stories that laments the closure of so many of its kind.
There’s yet more ukulele for the title track, a street in New Orleans, the almost tropical-tinged song a reminiscence of, as he puts it “a special person at a very special time”.
Parochially riffing on the title of the Tony Bennett classic, opening with backwards tape, the penultimate track is the keyboards woozy (I Left My Heart In A Part Of) Seven Sisters which dates back to a time at the early part of the century, living in a warehouse in the Tottenham sub-district, a wistful reflection of the end of one era, the start of a new one and a memory of things left behind to time (“things could have gone one way or another, instead they didn’t go anywhere at all”), a song that harks to the self-proclaimed influence of the hazed romantic side of Guy Garvey.
And so, it closes with the seven-minute On The Overwhelming Sadness Of Gravity, fingerpicked on a 40s guitar, another true story ramble through feelings and memories, about inevitability, this time in the wake of a trip to Dublin, that wryly borrows Gwyneth Paltrow’s line about “consciously uncoupling” from “the only train I’ve ever known”, all to the background of an orchestra tuning up. Disarmingly simple and beguiling in its songs of bruised hearts and battered hopes, as paraphrasing the old saying about Chinese takeaways, listen once and you’ll be wanting to listen again almost immediately afterwards.
https://www.quartermanmusic.com/