Without a doubt, Dan Haywood’s music is among some of the most original to have featured on Folk Radio. Described as existing in the liminal space between folk, pop and outer-musics, his latest EP was released in May this year, a 5-track offering featuring Josephine Foster, but before this, we need to go back to 2013 and Dapple. Dapple was recorded at various locations in the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire, near to where he lives and works as a songwriter and ornithologist. In his album review, Thomas Blake notes, “Haywood’s idiosyncratic voice bears a passing resemblance to Robyn Hitchcock, although more heavily accented and much more rural. And while he shares a certain eccentricity with Hitchcock or Syd Barrett, his vision is all his own. His primary influences, rather than having their roots in popular or folk music, seem to have seeped up from the ancient ground on which he made these airy and beautifully understated recordings.”
He is certainly an individual in the sense that his creations follow no rigid structure. His 2010 release, Dan Haywood’s New Hawks, featured no less than 32 tracks (the triple vinyl boxset is beautiful). Despite many songs on offer, every track engages and stays ingrained in the mind, from the quirky steel-stringed String Eagle to the wonderfully uplifting finale of Peatshack McKay.
As it says in the press for his new album Country Dustbin, he is indebted to troubadour cultures as much as natural history, psychogeography and centuries of British poetry and prose; his work takes singer-songwriter culture to the edge of the cliff, tip-toeing off the precipice, occasionally flying freely over uncharted territory.
For this new one-track album (and complimentary book of poetry), Dan uses the aesthetic language of American music (the cyclical dirge of blues and rock’n’roll, the organ funk of R’n’B, the rhythmic syntax of hip-hop) and folds them into a subjective template for his ‘Country Dustbin’: a song that attempts to come to terms with the clutter of life in the 20th & 21st century. He utilises the Country Dustbin, in his own words, as “a bottomless pit when you need to dispose of a traumatic episode, a confession booth, a time capsule… an alembic to distill experience, a torch to illuminate a mystery, an arena for a reckoning.”
From Los Angeles to Peckham, from Armenia to Perry Barr, switching between autobiographical scenes and stolen observations of the lives of British people, Haywood conjures poetry that walks a tightrope across the joyful, the sad, the wondrous, the banal. Unburdened by dogmatism or linearity, there are glints of Ted Hughes, J.H.Prynne, Robert Burton and Bob Dylan whipping his observations to allegorical and metaphysical heights. Each syllable is wedded to the band’s hypnotic beat as organic sounds unfurl throughout the 53-minute duration of the piece.
Following a slew of ambitious projects, beginning in public with his star-gazing New Hawks triple LP in 2010, and more recently a series from his high gain outfit Pill Fangs, ‘Country Dustbin’ finds an uncompromising artist playfully pushing songcraft to new places.
Watch an excerpt below – video by Amy Dickson, a founding member of all-female collective collective-iz and co-director of the online programme series XVIIX.
The album will be launched at Cafe Oto on SUNDAY 3 OCTOBER 2021, 7.30 PM. Don’t miss a great evening of music, Dan Haywood Band plus global jazz experience Kishon Khan Trio and the wonderful Emma Tricca.
Tickets here: https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/dan-haywood-band/
Country Dustbin is released on Cafe Oto’s own TakuRoku Records on 1st October 2021 (CD/LP/DD).
More gems here: https://danhaywood.bandcamp.com/