Bird in the Belly – After the City
GF*M Records (GFM0013) – 25 February 2022
In 1885 the nature writer Richard Jefferies published one of the strangest and most visionary novels in the whole of English literature. After London or Wild England was an early experiment in science fiction and perhaps the first example of what we might call an ecological apocalypse ever committed to the page, a lyrical depiction of a mysteriously depopulated country in which the monolithic edifices of the industrial revolution quickly return to nature and London is covered by stagnant water.
Brighton-based folk group Bird In The Belly (singer Ben ‘Jinnwoo’ Webb, Laura Ward on flute and vocals, guitarist and percussionist Adam Ronchetti and multi-instrumentalist Tom Pryor) have created a concept album that provides a kind of musical prequel or backstory to the novel, a creation myth for a future world, combining new lyrics with old ballads and poems as well as songs based on passages from the novel.
At this point, I must admit that I have a vested interest. I live in Swindon, a twenty-minute walk from the house at Coate (now an excellent museum), where Jefferies grew up and did much of his early work. A good chunk of my first dissertation involved a discussion of his mystical autobiography, The Story of My Heart. I have read After London more than once. I feel strangely defensive towards Jefferies, a writer whose style (high-Victorian mysticism meets earthy romanticism) tends to polarise critics, and I’m eager to see that any new piece of art that engages with his writing does so sympathetically and with a high level of understanding.
Thankfully, we’re in good hands. Bird In The Belly’s approach is eloquent, lovingly detailed and touched with a welcome dash of experimentalism. Previous albums (2018’s The Crowing and 2019’s Neighbours and Sisters) are full of traditional songs from comparatively obscure sources, adapted in modern, exciting ways. After The City continues in that same vein, musically speaking, and the songs are given extra narrative impetus by their unique subject matter. The album is structured chronologically, progressing from a kind of urban arcadia, through catastrophe, to death and then rebirth. It begins with Tragic Hearts Of Towns, an instantly bracing introduction propelled by fiddle and acoustic guitar. It is adapted from an 1857 poem by Alexander Smith about Glasgow and perfectly encapsulates the sad beauty of cities. It is sung with punkish abandon by Ward and Webb.
Litany provides an immediate counterpoint. It is the first of four consecutive songs inspired by the horsemen of the apocalypse. Its lyrics come from an Elizabethan play by Thomas Nashe written during and about an outbreak of bubonic plague. Pryor’s violin ascends to the heavens while the lyrics speak of earthly and inescapable pestilence. The broadside ballad Jemmy Is Slain is a perfect vehicle for the voices of Webb and Ward: Webb’s is cracked, impassioned and instantly recognisable, while Ward’s is more traditionally folky and perhaps more stoic but is just as emotionally charged. Together they create a strange, magical energy.
The Lancashire Cotton Famine of the 1860s resulted in suffering, riots and mass emigration. A number of songs and poems survive and are an important resource for understanding an often overlooked part of British history one such song is Famine, Fever, Frost, which was written by an anonymous contributor to the Rochdale Pilot and is sung here by Ward with a graceful, minimal musical backing which grows imperceptibly sadder and eerier, courtesy of Pryor’s surefooted production. The last of the ‘four horsemen’ songs, Pale Horse (see video below), is also the most unnerving. A disarmingly sweet flute gives way to a devastating tale of yellow fever, the inescapable march of disease symbolised by Ronchetti’s ticking, tramping percussion, while an e-bowed guitar blows like an apocalyptic wind through the bones of the song.
Another Cotton Famine poem, Smokeless Chimneys, is sung a cappella by Ward, with Webb joining her, and is another beautiful example of her clear, powerful singing. It provides a stark warning about the precarious nature of industrial progress. It is followed by Landmark, an instrumental interlude composed by Pryor, which forms a natural break in the album’s narrative.
Where the previous six songs were concerned with the events leading up to Jefferies’ story, the last three focus on – and are in fact adapted from – the text itself. Jefferies took some joy in his descriptions of a city taken over by plants, and a countryside returned to a state of nature. When he wrote passages like ‘by the thirtieth year there was not one single open place, the hills only excepted, where a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of wild creatures or cut himself a path’ you get the feeling that this kind of landscape would be ideal for Jefferies, who spent much of his life exploring the Wiltshire downs and beech woods. This enthusiasm for wildness is reflected in the upbeat nature of the song After London, with its peppy melody that bubbles over descriptions of overripe fields and animal corpses that ‘fed the barren land ‘til everything was green.’
Lay Low Lay is another jaunty melody that gives a positive spin on a set of lyrics that, in other hands, might sound incredibly dark. When Ward sings about a thousand years of decay and a million human beings rotting under the lake that has engulfed London, it is, somehow, uplifting rather than depressing. Perhaps we begin to better understand the circularity of life, or perhaps we all have a secret yearning to start again, to see the earth anew. The final track, The Ships, is the most positive of all, offering hope in the vastness of the sea, a blank canvas.
Despite After The City’s historical preoccupations, it’s hard not to see the album through a contemporary lens. The rancid pool that covers London and its slowly rotting dead could easily be an allegorical jab at a corrupt, overly centralised political system, while it’s possible to surmise that the initial catastrophic event that led to the decimation of the human population (an event which, in the novel, is left to the imagination of the reader) may have been some new and unexpected outbreak of disease. This obviously gives the album another layer of meaning and perhaps means that the songs cut to the bone with even more precision. But a better way to judge After The City is on its songs, its musicianship, its sheer ambition. Bird In The Belly are one of the most talented and unusual groups around, and here they have taken on a relatively obscure subject and made it accessible, gripping and mythical.
After the City is released on 25th Feb 2022. Pre-Order via: Cargo Records
Album Launch Show
Sat 26th Feb – The Harrison at Kings Cross, London with New Roots promotions.
Info and ticket link: https://www.wegottickets.com/event/535154
More here: https://www.birdinthebelly.com/