Earlier this year, Brighton-based folk group Bird In The Belly (featuring singer Ben ‘Jinnwoo’ Webb, Laura Ward on flute and vocals, guitarist and percussionist Adam Ronchetti and multi-instrumentalist Tom Pryor) released After the City, a concept album inspired by Richard Jefferies’ early sci-fo dystopian novel After London Or, Wild England, published in 1885. Folk Radio’s Thomas Blake described it as 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. After the City 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.
For their latest offering, Bird in the Belly once more turn to the distant past, this time to food horticulturalist John Whittingham. They shared the following on ‘Employ John Day No More’:
“A few weeks back we were commissioned to write, perform and record some work for Food Union as part of Coventry City of Culture. We took the diaries of food horticulturalist John Whittingham which span from 1745-91, and used the text to write two songs detailing the historic food growing communities of the city of Coventry. Here is a video of us performing one of the songs – ‘Employ John Day No More’ in Sherbourne Valley Allotments. We’ll be putting out something extra special involving these songs in a few months – dust off your record players!”
This year, Folk Radio UK is a media partner of Sidmouth Folk Festival, and we are co-curating ‘A Cellarful of Folkadelia’ at Kennaway House daily between 3-5 pm (30 July-4 August). The first band will be Bird in the Belly; also appearing are Sairie, Eugenia Georgieva, Windjammer, Bush Gothic, Ben Paley, Modeste Hugues, Serious Sam Barrett, N’famady Kouyate, Angeline Morrison, Nick Hart and Elspeth Anne. We’ll have more on this event soon – tickets and more details are available from the Sidmouth Folk Festival website.
For more details and all of Bird in the Belly’s upcoming live dates visit: https://www.birdinthebelly.com/tour-dates