The Young’uns
Tiny Notes
Hudson Records
7 April 2023
When singing unaccompanied and in unison, The Young’uns make an elemental sound, and on ‘Tiny Notes’, it pins you to the wall; they have created an album that has the potential to become a benchmark classic in modern topical folk music.
One should never underestimate the power of words; when chosen well, expressed and distributed appropriately, they can change the course of a life for the better. I will use words today intending to inspire anyone who reads this to go out and buy the brilliant new album by The Young’uns entitled ‘Tiny Notes’. But even if successful and succinct, my words will not have anything like the impact or instigate such tangible intervention and healing as those handwritten words left by 22-year-old Paige Hunter. She had written those tiny notes and left them tied to the railings at Sunderland’s Wearmouth Bridge (shown on the album’s cover), a location that has tragically been the scene of many suicides. But Paige’s messages have saved lives; it is understood that as many as thirty people nearing the point of irreversible desperation have been pushed back from the brink by those very notes. Furthermore, the action has inspired many similar acts of kindness at other locations worldwide. It really is a heart-warming true story of humanity’s often under-the-radar capacity for good and a great example of the real-life seeds that have motivated Sean Cooney to evolve his already impressive skills as a song writer.
The Young’uns were once the fish-out-of-water younger generation curios frequenting their local Stockton Folk Club backroom sessions, nowadays they are a long-established award-winning mainstay on the UK folk circuit, no longer quite so young as their music shows a maturity and growth befitting their current age and appearance. In 2018 they made major inroads in terms of profile with the ambitious ‘The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff’ album and show, a fully realised and eloquent tribute to the life of a local Teesside hero. We hear this thread developing further on ‘Tiny Notes’, particularly the topical and social writing of Sean Cooney. Anyone who heard Radio Two’s recent ‘21st Century Folk Songs’ and the Young’uns original song about Middlesborough GP Ifti Lone is aware how Cooney has cultivated a facility for songs authentically traditional that naturally settle into the modern cannon of music. With this new album, however, that craftsmanship has been granted the space and ambition to unload a whole album’s worth of songs that reflect specific modern-day traumas and terror, tying them to true personal stories which instantly afford the work all too real depth. Add to that the familiar rich combination of voices gelling Cooney with Michael Hughes and David Eagle, not to mention that nowadays Eagle is playing some tasteful piano, and you have this trio’s most musically satisfying release to date.
‘Tiny Notes’ is produced by Andy Bell, and it also benefits from some help from Karine Polwart, Lucy Farrell and Anne Lamb, as well as some string arrangements courtesy of Jon Boden. Despite all this promise of musical flexing, though, we open with ‘Jack Merritt’s Boots’, and it is a soaring testimony to the talent that brought these lads to prominence in the first place. Those three vocalists, singing unaccompanied and in unison, make a sound that is elemental; it pins you to the wall. Then, after the primal thrill of the sound has bedded, your thoughts turn to those words. Jack Merritt was working at a prisoners rehabilitation event in 2019 when he was killed at the London Bridge terror attack. Despite this tragedy at the core of the song, it is absolutely right that the Young’uns attack this with such spirit, for that is the facet of the man that they are celebrating in song, although buried in those lyrics, particularly the line about him not knowing he would not live beyond the age of 25, are words that can shatter.
Throughout these songs, you find testimonies, tributes and odes to people who have fallen in tragedy alongside tales of unbreakable endurance, indefatigable strength of character, spirit and humanity amid war zones and the ongoing conflicts that continue to erupt around the world. We hear about Lyra McKee (Lyra), the Belfast journalist who was killed in 2019 whilst observing a riot in Derry (a great example of understated string arrangement, used in such a way that the silences are as vital as the expressive glissandos) and Richard Moore, also from Derry and a man blinded as a child by a bullet during the Troubles. Later there is a song about a trauma surgeon called David Nott (The Surgeon) and how he saved the life of a young ISIS fighter in Syria; it is a wonderfully elegiacal piece fuelled by lush piano chords. Another beautiful love tune called Tim Burman is set around the tale of a fatal casualty in the Lockerbie bombing of 1988 (written at the behest of one of the victims sister), and there is also a stunning song called Three Dads Walking, about the inspiring efforts of fathers whose daughters had taken their own lives, raising money to achieve age-appropriate suicide prevention on school curriculums.
It might just be that the biggest indicator of the immeasurable potential within the ranks of The Young’uns lies in a song such as Roseberry Moon. Essentially the piece was inspired by a photograph taken at full moon around the Roseberry Topping hill on the North Yorkshire Moors. It depicted a couple in a lunar silhouette, a romantic scene captured in song with such beauty I feel like I know the location despite never having been there. This is no mere functional writing, the trio united in exaltation are transporting themselves to that moment, and the way the melody paints such alluring sounds with its bold changes is absolutely sensational. You cannot write music like this to order; you must feel the magic of the moment and have fluency of musical expression in your armoury to translate it into a song. They repeat the title refrain at the end repeatedly; you sense this is because the sound they make and the feeling it evokes brings so much joy it demands repetition, and that is certainly how it feels for the listener. The same can be said of the title track, with the strings and piano interacting in such a classic style that, when set against the moving “tiny little notes tied on to the bridge, sometimes love’s not enough, but sometimes it is” lyrical context, you have the audio equivalent of a Lowry. Deceptively simple, detailed, industrial northern landscapes populated by real lives serving to enrich work with the substantive potential to become a benchmark classic in modern topical folk music.
Tiny Notes is released on 7 April (CD/DL – Vinyl expected in late April)
Tiny Notes Tour Dates
The Young’uns are on tour from April 2023.
08/04 LIVERPOOL Philharmonic Hall
09/04 EDINBURGH Summerhall
10/04 SHREWSBURY St Mary’s Church
11/04 NORWICH Arts Centre
12/04 SHOREHAM Ropetackle
13/04 SANDWICH St Mary’s Arts Centre
14/04 LONDON Union Chapel
15/04 ALDEBURGH Jubilee Hall
21/04 SHEFFIELD Firth Hall
20/05 DUBLIN Pavilion Dun Laoghaire
26/05 GATESHEAD The Sage
27/05 CLECKHEATON Town Hall
28/05 BRISTOL The Redgrave Theatre
30/05 OXFORD North Wall
31/05 CARDIFF Acapela
01/06 LINCOLN Drill Hall
02/06 MANCHESTER The Stoller Hall
Tickets and more details can be found here: https://www.theyounguns.co.uk/live