Ríoghnach Connolly & Honeyfeet
It’s Been A While, Buddy
We Are Stardust
21 October 2022
It has been a while, but given the major pandemic disruption and singer Ríoghnach Connolly‘s involvement in a range of other projects (The Breath, Afro-Celt Sound System, Band of Burns), oh and Ríoghnach and guitarist Ellis Davies having had a daughter along the way, four years really doesn’t seem too long to have waited for the latest eclectic, expansive chapter from Honeyfeet. It’s Been A While, Buddy is their third album since they formed in 2008 – interspersed by several singles, E.P.s and remixes; of particular note, last year’s cover of Tom Waits’ Clap Hands, coupled with an unmissable version of the jazz standard You Go To My Head, Ríoghnach channelling her inner Billie Holiday – and follows Orange Whip (reviewed here).
I spoke to the reigning BBC Radio 2 Folk Singer of the Year, Ríoghnach Connolly about how they made the album and the stories behind some of the songs (she wrote nearly all the lyrics). The band had almost finished a version of the album before lockdown but reconvened when they could and decided that changed and challenging personal and wider circumstances necessitated a refresh and a different approach: “We started again sat in a room and wrote it all in a circle, facing each other, with the baby in the middle. Most of the tunes that were ready to go got put to the back, and we re-wrote loads of songs and wrote some new things. A lot of the songs started out really quiet. There was a totally different feel.”
Alongside Ríoghnach, Honeyfeet are: Lorien Garth Edwards, bass; Ellis Davies, guitar; John Ellis, keyboards; Biff Roxby, brass; and Phil Howley, drums; former member Rik Warren adds harmonica and vocals to around half the tracks; Phyllida Maude-Roxby plays strings on a couple of tracks.
A minute’s worth of gentle, ambient-ish vocals and keyboards on Work It starts the album off, but the track soon launches into an animated, choppy rhythm, with a Dexys-like horn break. A key line, “I don’t know how to work it. But I don’t think they don’t want me to know”, is followed by a reassuringly frenetic end section replete with Ríoghnach chanting “They don’t want you to know” with real urgency. The song Ríoghnach told me is: “A diatribe on the technology filling us with fear. It was so destructive in my life growing up in the north of Ireland. I knew I couldn’t trust it and that it lied about what was really happening.”
Border Bodies is a slow, ruminative song – musically conjuring up images of drifting at sea – which can be heard as a contemplation on the impact of migration on those refugees who manage to get across the border, on those who are left behind and those who die in act of trying. For Ríoghnach, it reflects a decade of working with refugee groups and with school children to write songs imagining what it would be like to be a refugee. The day I spoke to her, she had just held a coffee morning singing session with Iranian, Afghani, Syrian, Sudanese and Angolan women singing songs in Farsi, Arabic and Portuguese. She described how overwhelming she finds it hearing refugees describe their experiences, in part having herself lived through a prolonged conflict in a colonised country: “Their beautiful but harrowing stories always put me on my arse.” At a time of appalling, renewed scapegoating of refugees and asylum seekers, we need such songs of empathy and solidarity.
Devil’s Work has a funky, almost march rhythm that is something of a band trademark on this occasion, with the brass more understated than you might expect but loping bass and a jaunty fairground organ sound driving the song along. In the first instance, it is, Ríoghnach said, about being in a long-term relationship and not getting married in the face of familial – “still listening to our family’s ways. Tapping up my wrist, looking at the calendar waiting for the judgement day” – and societal expectations, but informed by a wider opposition to organised religion and an authoritarian establishment. Ríoghnach described it as “My pop hit of the summer” – we’ll find out next summer.
We are distinctly in 80s dance/pop territory with They Want What You Got. There is something of a Talking Heads-like sensibility as it bounces along, bass high up the fretboard, then a mid-song dreamy interregnum before resuming the beat and finishing with a hypnotic repetition of the words of the song title. The video version was recorded remotely during lockdown.
The pace is more of an amble on I Could Not Sing A Note. When the trombone comes in behind the vocal, it adds a layer of menace that’s repeated towards the end of the song on a swirling dramatic string break, on which the trombone and viola return in tandem.
How Could I, the first single off the album, occupies an attention-grabbing space stretching across rock, 80s Bowie and soul – “a jet powered soul banger”, as Ríoghnach put it. The song is punctuated by an uncluttered funky rhythm that leaves plenty of space for the vocal. At first glance a song about regret, centred on the pleading chorus line ‘How could I ever let you go?’, it becomes obvious that the story is not so straightforward with a reference to ‘gaslighting’ and an urging to ‘get unstuck from your rut’. In fact, Ríoghnach said it “is a bit dark as essentially it’s about marital abuse, control, and domestic coercion. A partner who cannot let go of their abuser. Shifting from not realising that they were in a toxic relationship to realising that even if they did, they would have suffered it willingly anyway.” In a typical Honeyfeet juxtaposition, both the music and the singing heads, collage-like video betray little, if anything, of the serious nature of the lyrics.
It’s Been A While, Buddy feels even more varied than previous efforts, with its sparse introductions on some songs and more shifts in tempo within many tracks. There is a little less that is obviously dance paced, though future remixes might deal with that, and less evident flute from Ríoghnach, but she seems to have saved that for a gorgeous traditional album she has made with her extended family that’s due for release shortly. I suggested to Ríoghnach that several of the tracks seemed much closer in feel to the kind of material she writes and sings with The Breath. She recognised the observation, saying that both lyrically and musically, the album is “more considered” than with earlier albums:
“There were songs on earlier records that I wrote on the spot that I didn’t edit because they rhymed, and they were good enough. These subjects are too important to not handle properly. I needed to strike a little deeper for this one because there’s too much going on in the world. I used to think that my anger wasn’t warranted but I’ve realised that it’s more than warranted; it’s really justified and essential that I speak about it otherwise it will eat me up. There are some songs that are really striking although they sound really poppy and happy. The harder hitting ones are the most tuneful.”
Ríoghnach Connolly & Honeyfeet continue their unique journey, sharing dollops of theatrical fun amongst more honest, personal, heartfelt lyrics whilst always inhabiting a sprawling terrain of musical forms.
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