Broken Harbours
Songs For John Alfred
Self Released
2023
Featuring one of the most striking songs I’ve heard this year, Songs For John Alfred marks the arrival of a conspicuous new voice on the folk-Americana circuit; a full album is eagerly awaited.
Songs for John Alfred is Rachel Ingrams, aka Broken Harbours, debut EP. Broken Harbours is described as “A girl, guitar and their four-part tale of love and loss from a woodland high above the loneliest village in Wales”.
It’s a generally folksy affair, her voice somewhere between Melanie and the young Lal Waterson. Rachel is also an author (Blood Tender – Tindal Street Press), and that novelist sensibility kicks in from the start with the acoustic fingerpicked Ballad of Genevieve James; drawing you in with “I am the ghost of Genevieve James/And I walk this twisted road/Where the white oak and the ash bend and wrangle/And hide the crimes/Of the highwaymen who wait/For the trip and crack and jangle/Of horses moving in time”. A murder ballad tragedy set in the 1700s on a stretch of road between Horeb chapel and the old Halfway House, Halfway-Trecastle, one of the most dangerous stretches of road in Wales at that time, sung in the voice of its ill-fated narrator, it tells how, just wed to Solomon James, her “Sweet steadying angel from the borderland”, she’s stabbed to death by one of those brigands.
Ingram cites Gillian Welch as an influence and, joined by Murray Easton on guitar and vocals, that Southern Gothic backwoods feel permeates Black Bella Louise, a song born of briefly losing her black whippet on a steep piece of land just short of Halfway, in Allt Ysgoedreddfin, Powys that, introducing the figure of the red-haired John Alfred (apparently a real ‘old soul’ who perhaps still wanders the Halfway hills) transforms into a brooding number about lost love or perhaps abduction (“Have you seen Bella Louise?…Last time I saw her she was heading east/Down the emerald road/With a man I did not know”) and mortality (“maybe you’ve gone to make your peace”).
Featuring piano by Dharmamayi Arrowsmith, the fingerpicked rippling Outlines opens with the line about “Sunrise over Pen-y-Fan”, sparking a spooky genuine coincidence about 60s female Welsh trio Y Diliau, who came from Llanymddyfri in the Brecons where Pen Y Fan is situated, and had a song called John Alfred. After two numbers about loss, this is a more upbeat lyric about being away from the one you love (“And you talk to me of leaving going miles/And miles and miles and miles and miles and miles from me/Just to find your cup of peace your cup of mercy”) and of the anticipation of being reunited (“Leave the latch on when you get home/Hang your green beret by the door…You smooth your white curls on the pillow and I’m undone/Watch the outline of me coming near/And I count the old roses still in your window/I close my eyes/Love’s lightning halo crowning me”).
The last number, Nigel Edwards on silver shaker, the melancholic, quietly devastating mountain-folk coloured Cecilia, shares a similar idea, only here it sketches a mother comforting her “flameheaded daughter”, “the most beautiful child they’d ever seen/In this valley green” who’s missing her absent father (“Mama when will he be coming home”), switching to her or perhaps his voice for the darker toned “True love Cecilia I never knew/Always stumbling into trouble/Now here I come trembling through/These empty rooms, I did my best/I swear I did/To fill them”, before revealing the dark clouds of impending mortality with the closing “I’ll meet you down where the larches lean/Gonna be those footsteps right behind you/And then we’ll walk that lonely highway/Celia I think I hear the engine…come on home Cecilia/To the body you have known…Feel your sweet surrender girl/Feel your soul rising/Only angels leave this world”. Cecilia is one of the most striking songs I’ve heard this year, and Songs For John Alfred marks the arrival of a conspicuous new voice on the folk-Americana circuit; a full album is eagerly awaited.