In opening his review of Wheels of the World, the third album from English folk trio Granny’s Attic, Peter Shaw described the trio as if: “…they’ve fallen through a wormhole in the late 60s/70s and arrived in the present-day sounding remarkably like the British folk giants of that era: Tony Rose, Nic Jones, Martin Carthy, Dave Swarbrick and John Kirkpatrick.” He concludes that it: “…not only sounds like a classic folk album of many years vintage, but it can also stand head-and-shoulders with the best of them too. And it seems like they’ve only just started.”
Since then, we’ve all been eager to hear what’s next! The good news is that Granny’s Attic are releasing their fourth studio album, ‘The Brickfields’, on 8th October 2021 (available to pre-order now). While that may seem a while off for some of you, we have the pleasure of premiering a video for the album’s lead single “Cruds & Cream/Jig From New Harmony“.
The album represents something of a diversion for the band: while their previous two releases – 2019’s ‘Wheels Of The World’ and 2016’s ‘Off The Land’ – included both songs and tunes with an emphasis on the former, this album consists entirely of instrumentals. Granny’s Attic worked with accomplished producer Ian Stephenson (with production credits including Alistair Anderson, Kathryn Tickell, Rachael McShane, and more) and recorded the album live, with no overdubs, over 3 days in April 2021.
“We’d spent the previous 12 months in different places, unable to play live, so we were really keen to get in a room and make music together in real time. We really wanted to get that pure sound of us three sitting down and playing in a room together, and Ian’s done an amazing job of capturing that.”
Of “Cruds & Cream/Jig From New Harmony” they tell us:
We spend a lot of time looking for old tunes in archives and old books, and this tune set came out of that process.
Cohen came across the first tune, ‘Cruds & Cream’, in The Great Northern Tune Book (edited by Matt Seattle), which is a published version of a huge manuscript that contains nearly 600 tunes, compiled by North Eastern fiddle player William Vickers.
The second tune, ‘Jig From New Harmony’, appears in an 1826 manuscript from New Harmony, in Indiana, which Lewis got via the brilliant Village Music Project (https://www.village-music-project.org.uk/).
They’re really fun tunes to play and we can’t wait to get out and share them with a live audience.
This is such a delightfully infectious upbeat tune, perfect for brightening up a very damp Monday morning…
The single is out today and available via: https://grannysattic.bandcamp.com/track/cruds-cream-jig-from-new-harmony
Audio/video by Ian Stephenson at Simpson Street Studios, Northumberland.
Lewis Wood – Violin
George Sansome – Guitar
Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne – Melodeon
The Brickfields is released on Grimdon Records on 8th October 2021, available to pre-order on CD now via: https://www.grannysattic.org.uk/product/the-brickfields-album-pre-order/
Website: https://www.grannysattic.org.uk/