M G Boulter’s new album (reviewed here) introduces us to the eerily familiar landscape of Clifftown, a sleepy seaside resort on the east coast of England. It’s another first-class release from Hudson Records and marks the third album from Boulter himself.
Folk Radio UK got the chance to have a natter with Boulter about the release, the appeal of sleepy suburbia, and the legend that was Frankie Howard. First, Boulter introduced us to the album and the story behind Clifftown.
It’s a collection of songs that are rooted in my personal experience, and my feelings about my hometown, which is Southend-on-Sea, in Essex, sort of 40 miles east of London on the River Thames, and you know, I live in suburbia, and I don’t feel many people write about suburbia. But, for me, suburbia is all I’ve ever really known, and so it pervades all my song writing, it certainly has for at least the last 10 years.
It sort of all came to a point with Clifftown, because I was writing a lot of songs, and as I was collecting them together, I thought actually, there’s a theme here, about growing up in suburbia, and these experiences that I’ve had in the in Essex suburban environment by the seaside, so it naturally came from that.
Clifftown is, to a degree, a fictional, but entirely recognisable landscape. It’s a world familiar to many of us from our own youth, but its roots are in a very real part of Southend.
It’s a little trick. The original intent of Clifftown was a fictional name, which describes Southend, which is a town on a cliff. It has that sort of Gothic connotations, you know, this sort of isolated windswept cliff with a town and these strange characters on it. But also, Clifftown is a very small area of Southend; it’s the Victorian Georgian area of Clifftown. So, in this town centre, you’ve got your 1960s, High Street, and then to the side, you’ve got this beautiful area with a bowling green and Georgian and Victorian buildings, which is a conservation zone. That was known as Clifftown.
It developed when the train line was brought out to Southend in the 1850s and 1860s. Fairly well to do Victorians would come and get some sea air, but people don’t refer to its Clifftown now, but in Victorian times, it was referred to as Clifftown.
So, there’s that double play on the word really. It was never meant to reflect the historical area of Southend. It was the moniker that I use to sum up any British seaside town because we know them so well. You know, they’re all the same I think, pretty much every seaside town I go to, they will have the same demographic, same challenges, and the same beauty.
I’m sure all of us have experienced a love/hate relationship with the place where we grew up. When young, escape is often the first thought on our minds when we think of our hometown, but there is also that cosy familiarity and history of a place so ingrained in our memory. It’s no accident that so many of us return to our hometowns as we age.
London is only 40 miles away, so it’s like salmon swimming upstream. There’s a life cycle to Southend in that families move here because it is relatively safe. It’s nice, there’s lots to do. But then as kids grow up, they just get bored. There’s nothing here and they can get on the train and be in London, you know, one of the major cities in the world. So, they all disappear. Then when they are at an age when they want to have kids, they come back to Southend. So, you get a real mixture of people. You get these really young angsty kids that don’t want to be here. You get elderly people that have stayed here for a long time and seen their families come and go and then you’ve got young families.
And there is you know, I love and hate my hometown in equal measure, I think anyone who’s grown up and stayed in their hometown, you get that don’t you, you can’t leave because there’s something here, that je ne sais quoi, that keeps you here. But then you can see everything that’s wrong with it and, and I think Southend has been hit hard in recent years as a seaside town.
In the summer it is absolutely mobbed, but you come down here in early January, everything just looks a bit desolate and a bit tired. Southend has a bad press, a lot of people overlook it, and that’s unfair.
I make music, hopefully for people to take what they want from it, but it’s not criticising, and it’s not banging the drum for a particular town. You know, even when I tour there’s some pretty rough places around the country, but people live there, and they love it, and they have a passion for where they live. That’s the same here in Southend. I hope I do it justice in the record and that I show both faces of it.
One of the album’s key themes is the passing of time. In some cases, such as in ‘Soft White Belly’ this is seasonal; the quietness of a seaside town once visitors have left after the summer. It’s there too, in the poetic lifespan of a city. It is especially, most poignantly felt, in the contrast between youth and age in title track ‘Clifftown’ and ‘Fan of the Band’. It’s a subject Boulter is very conscious of.
Yeah, I’m getting older, I don’t consider myself young anymore and when I do, my nieces, you know, well and truly make it clear that I’m not! I’m not down with the kids! But yeah, I think as you grow older, it goes back to that idea of reappraising your hometown, and as you get older, you think, well, I had a very good childhood, I loved Southend, it had everything I needed when I was 8 years old. It had everything I needed when I was 12, you know, had everything I needed when I was 25. But now, you think well, what is this now? The change in the economy has definitely taken its toll, and all the shops are shut, there’s not so much variety of venues and places to go – for young and old.
Clifftown evokes a landscape of rain, closed shops, and faded dreams. Throughout the album though, there is immense affection for the town and its inhabitants. A warmth pervades Boulter’s song writing which eases the listener through the town’s streets.
All the characters in the songs resonate with me because I am of them. I identify myself in every one of them. In Southend people have this view of, you know, we’re not the best place in the world, but it’s ours, and we love it.
There’s a song called ‘The Slow Decline’, which is really a reflection on the town itself, and me being maybe a bit of a curmudgeon getting older going, “oh, what’s happened to all these nice places that I used to go to!” There’s a woman at the beginning of that who wanted to be an actress, and she’s singing in the fairground. That was somebody I kind of knew. She wanted to be this actress, and obviously, she didn’t become the star of stage and screen. She ended up singing to all the kids at the Peter Pan’s playground, and I admire that because she wasn’t giving up her vocation or her calling. She was doing what she wanted with a passion. Admittedly, she might not be in Hollywood, but she’s in Southend and she’s doing what she can. And I think that’s what resonates with me.
Nearly all the characters, everything is true. Everything is derived from something I’ve seen. I was sitting in a cafe in the offseason, and there was this elderly lady, and she was, we call them here the tuppeny shunts, which are those moving shelves, and you sort of put all your coins on the shelf, and then it pushes the coins out and you get a toy, it’s on the shelf. She was on her own, and she was just putting her pennies into this tuppeny shunt, and it was like an Edward Hopper painting.
The album certainly has a very visual element, one of the qualities of the best storyteller songwriter.
As a songwriter, I like to put people into an environment. I like songs where I can picture myself as the listener in somewhere or being with that character. I’m a voracious reader, I read a lot, so I pick up a lot of novelistic approaches. You know, when you read a great first page of a book, and you think, “wow, I’m there!”, whether it be in India or Canada, or, wherever, if there’s a strong environmental landscape, I find that very inspirational. So, for my music, and certainly with Clifftown, I wanted a hint of the area – I wanted people to be living in the area and seeing things as they were listening to music.
The name of Paul Simon crops up as a possible influence on Boulter’s song writing. A writer who is also rather adept at visual poetry and poignant melodies.
It’s really interesting, I don’t own one Paul Simon record, and I’ve never really been a fan of Paul Simon strangely enough, but people do reference it a lot, and I have actually been listening to him recently because of that. And I’m thinking, “oh, yeah, I do!” If I can have his success though, I’ll be well in there!
Growing up I started learning guitar, I was into a lot of rock bands, I was into a lot of guitar music. In terms of songwriter, I’m influenced a lot by American songwriters like Neil Young, and Bob Dylan, which seem fairly obvious, but for me when I first heard Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush when I was about 17, I thought what is this? I think that was the first time, that and Nick Cave, that was the first time I realised that you could be a bit more mature with how you present things, and you could deal with realistic things. It wasn’t all about fashion, or showbiz, it was about telling a truth, I hope that doesn’t sound too earnest, but you know, sort of revealing something of real life.
Belle and Sebastian too, I’m a big fan of Belle and Sebastian because again, their approach to song writing is the mundane of life and the everyday. That’s something that really attracted me as I got older. Life can be boring, life can be repetitive, you know, life can be suburban, so why don’t we write about that? Why don’t we celebrate that and unpack that in our art?
Perhaps due to Boulter’s influences there is a genuine timelessness in the album’s sound. Combined with theme on the shifting passing of time, on memory and dreams, it ensures Clifftown is an album deserving of multiple listens.
That’s a conscious decision by me. I’ve never wanted to follow a fad, I think that’s a dangerous thing, and I only really want to write the songs that I feel, and I want to write. So, I can only ever produce it in my own terms of reference. I’ve never made a recording, Clifftown included, where we’ve gone, right let’s make it like this so that it can be like this. Obviously, we make some decisions, but it’s always something that’s a very natural thing.
The twelve tracks on the album takes us on a haunting tour of Clifftown. Naturally, all the tracks have a very personal resonance for Boulter but there are a few that stand out in particular.
‘Clifftown’ was a really important song, that song is the mission statement of the whole album. I wrote that on a night where I just was going out walking, I needed to get something from the shops, and everything’s closed, and you just think God, you know, there is just nothing going on here. That sort of struck me as thinking, “well, no, that’s not true”, but it is true in a way also.
‘Fan of the band’ was another important one, that kind of encapsulated my experience. There’s a lot of bands down here, there’s a lot of musicians, and everyone plays in all the pubs and clubs. It’s a real scene. You’ve also got older people that knew the scene back in the 70s, and they’re always telling you what you should be doing and what they remember, and, you know, there’s this heritage here, this link between the past and the present. So those two songs are really important for me from a song writing perspective.
From a production perspective, one that really struck me was ‘Pilate’, which is the last track of the album. That was because we had so many musicians on that and there was a really orchestral approach to that song. I was really proud of how that turned out, and all the people that played on that and how everyone came together to produce, you know, this really deep orchestration. So yeah, I was very proud of that one.
In a curious twist of fate, it was ‘Pilate’ that helped the formation of Hudson Records, one the most exciting record labels to have emerged over the last few years.
So, Andy Bell, who runs Hudson Records, he’s a folk producer and sound engineer, had this idea of releasing an album of a collective of musicians. So back in 2016, he invited eleven of us to the studio and said, “you’ve got four days, make something and I’ll record it.” I think the idea was that he was going to have this album, and that was going to be it. Of course, you know, you get eleven musicians in a room, and everyone was sort of being really, you know, oh, can you go first, and no one was really pushing anything. I was really nervous, I’d literally just written ‘Pilate’, so I said, well, I’ve got this song, let’s just do that. Of course, everyone being great musicians as they are, just went, “Yeah, let’s do that, oh, I’ve got this idea!” Sam Sweeney corralled the strings, and Rob Harbron was like, “I’m going to play electric bases on this, I’m not going to play concertina at all”. He was excited because he’s playing electric bass, which he never does, and of course, there was loads of other people involved. That really kick-started that week, and there was probably about another three or four songs that we worked on. Andy, after that, was like, “Well, I can do this. I can get people together. I’m going to start Hudson Records.” So, it’s on me!
Formed in 2016, Hudson Records have certainly proved themselves to be a formidable force, with an exciting set of releases, for Boulter the appeal of the label is naturally enticing.
I think what’s nice about Hudson, and I don’t see myself as a folk musician, I can’t play much trad music for example, but what I like about Hudson is that, well, Andy’s really passionate for a start and the whole team, we’re a kind of cooperative, you know. We all have our team meetings, Zoom meetings, and we will chat, we will share things.
I also think the people that they pick, and they put out, are doing something quite original. It’s not the same stuff, and it’s not comfortable stuff, it’s something different. It’s got an image, you know, there’s a glue there that I think is important. Yeah, I love them. I think they’re great!
The challenge of 2020/2021 for all of us has been Covid-19. Musicians rely on gigs to help spread the word and, of course, to sell records. Releasing a new album during a period of lockdown presents extra challenges, but Boulter is quietly confident in the release, and so he should be, it’s a beautifully evocative listen. For the meantime, a tour and festivals appearances are planned.
It comes out on the 23rd of April, and then in terms of life, I’m busy getting a tour together for the autumn. I’ve just booked some dates, I’ve got about 10 dates, but there’ll be more to follow. The hope is I’ll play Folk on the Lawn, which is in Tintern (15-18 July), and FolkEast, in Suffolk (20-22 August), very near the Sutton Hoo burial so I’ll be visiting that as well, I’m sure!
It was 50/50, really why we release now. The album was recorded in May 2019. It was recorded then because that was when we could pretty much get everyone together. It was in the summer, late May, and it was glorious. It was in a really remote part of Wales and the plan was to release it in October 2020. But obviously, the pandemic happened. I’m lucky that Hudson Records are helping with the release and they said, “No, don’t release it yet, because you can’t gig. Don’t worry, this will all be over in two months, you’ll get your gigs back, and we’ll do it then”.
So, we planned to release it where we are now, which is April 2021. Again, it’s probably not the ideal time, because gigs haven’t come back, and as a musician, I really only sell records while gigging, you know, but in a way, it is a good time because it’s quiet, and it’s nice to do something and to be active.
Clifftown is certainly keeping Boulter busy. The release is accompanied by a dedicated website looking at the history of the area and a podcast which will unpack even more stories.
I’m doing a companion podcast to the album called the ‘Clifftown Podcast’ [A Guide to Clifftown – M G Boulter], and that has kind of taken me over, I’m sort of doing that constantly at the moment! So that’s going to last probably till the end of the year. I’m doing about 10 episodes and looking into history and culture. I studied history at university, so I’ve got a particular persuasion there. So, I’m looking into all sorts of cultural stories and things about Southend.
I get about 600 comments a day from Russian companies trying to sell me, you know, bonds in oil from Saudi Arabia, and then you get these real comments, and they are like gold dust because they’re so rare. Southend is full of stories.
There’s a place called Shoeburyness, which was a military place just out east of Southend. Frankie Howard was stationed there during the war, and supposedly he did his first comedy routines in The Grand which was this pub in Leigh-on-Sea, and of course, I just have to mention it and people have their own stories they bring to the table.
Clifftown is a genuinely beautiful record, with a lingering melancholy yet strangely hopeful vibe and illustrates Boulter’s superb talent as a songwriter. In the album’s sincerity and affection, it palpably clear that Boulter has a great affection for his hometown and especially its inhabitants. Clifftown may be a town in decline but the stories and its people are anything but. As Boulter notes, it’s often the little stories in a town, the ordinary ones that bring a place to life, that need to be remembered.
I think that’s what I enjoy doing about music and gigging is meeting people from other parts of the country. You know, I did a gig in Swindon, I remember this elderly guy was having a pint as we were setting up, and we sat next to him after we finished, and I know nothing about Swindon, but then he starts telling me all about the train line, and he was like, you know, my dad used to work on the trains, and this was a big depot and back in the day, this and that, and, and he was very proud of Swindon’s role in the creation of the railways in Britain. Then you go to Newport in South Wales. There was a single from The Stone Roses [Love Spreads] and the photograph for the cover was taken on the Newport bridge, and of course, every time I go to Newport, everyone says, “do you know the Stone Roses? That’s the front cover”, and I love that, you know, and that needs to be celebrated.
Pre-Order Clifftown: http://www.smarturl.it/clifftown
Photo Credit: Jinwoo