Born in Birmingham and now based on the Isle Of Wight, Paul Armfield is both a folk-persuasion singer-songwriter and the owner of a small bookshop in Cowes. His knowingly titled album, Between the Covers, subtitled 9 Songs for Bibliophiles, combines his two passions with a mix of originals and covers about books and reading. He’s accompanied by jazz musicians Uwe Schenk on keys, drummer Tortsen Krill, violinist Mari Person and Max Braun (also producer) and Jo Ambros contributing guitars and organ on different tracks.
It’s one of the four covers that turn the first page, a rhythmically shuffling, vocally echoing, muted piano, skittering drums and distorted tremolo guitar take on Willie Dixon’s blues classic You Can’t Judge A Book By The Cover, made famous by Bo Diddley.
Anyone who has acquired a pile of part or wholly unread books will identify with the uptempo jogging and time signature shifting drums scuffling and piano-driven Books Beside My Bed (“Here stands a tower of Babel/Where once there was a bedside table/Each book a good intention/The bricks of self-invention/Oh if I had only read the books beside my bed“) that manages to allude to Jon Robb’s book The Art Of Darkness: The History of Goth and is, of course, a metaphor for all those unfinished tasks on our to-do list.
Inspired by a visit to an exhibition of Ladybird Book artwork, the wistful, smokily sung Bookmarks evoke memories of the books and stories that shaped our younger years, from childhood (“stories at bedtime/Through heavy-lidded eyes/The ‘Listen With Mothers'”) to teenage years and “those dark penny-dreadfuls…the horrors and hauntings/That keep us from sleep” and the “French libertines”, indirectly referring Rupert Bear, Alice In Wonderland, the Beat Generation writers and the Traveller’s Companion Series published, in France only, in the 50s and 60s by the Paris Olympia Press, the album cover a direct homage, by authors such as Henry Miller, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Lawrence Durrell, Jean Cocteau, Samuel Beckett, JP Donleavy and, notably the first publication of Nabokov’s Lolita as “we hold on and bookmark the pages/The ones where we find ourselves/So we know this is here“.
Written in the first person, the dreamy, Gallic-flavoured, waltzing piano tinkled Paperback with Person adding string textures is a nostalgic affection love letter to those briefly bestseller autobiographies (“Come read my life/The truth behind scandal and lies/For the first time in paperback“) and disposable airport novels to be found in “every car boot sale and bargain box“, mentioning E.L. James, Dan Brown and particularly alluding to David Niven’s The Moon Is A Balloon, concluding “what a waste of good paper“.
The second cover is a stripped-back, dancingly fingerpicked reading of Elvis Costello’s Every Day I Write The Book, followed by the unlikely and eclectic inclusion of Books About UFOs, a semi-spoken song about a girl’s obsession with outer space by late Hüsker Düe drummer Grant Hart, a suitably spacy intro giving way to a psychedelic jazz-blues groove. That, in turn, gives way to the spooked and pulsing percussion and piano notes of the conspiratorially sung Turn The Page that conjures the very act of reading a book (“The careful parting of each leaf/Lifting slowly from the sheaf/From the right hand to the left“) and the anticipation of what each will reveal imagined as waves crashing on the shore and flowing back into the sea and vividly evoking “the stink/Of paper glue and ink/As you open up a book“.
The last of the original material, featuring some jazzy piano from Schenk and brisk bass lines by Braun, is the Gershwin-inflected My Bookworm, a story of a romance between two book-lovers that weaves in all manner of lexical wordplay as, in “every recto, every verso“, the one reads the other like a book “gently noting my mistakes/In blue pencil your amendments“, the narrator confessing “It’s true I’ve seen much better days/I’m not yet vintage, I’m not even retro/Sitting in the lost and found/Slightly dog-eared, poorly bound/Clearly needing some attentions“.
Having mentioned Gershwin, it’s apposite that it concludes with a sublime cover of Rogers and Hart’s I Could Write A Book, immortalised by Frank Sinatra in Pal Joey, the vocals hesitatingly and intimately whispered against a sparse cinematic piano backdrop, hushing you into a gentle, starlit sleep.
Thematically and musically, Between The Covers is unlike anything Paul Armfield’s done before; it’s a literary and literally gorgeous listen that deserves the musical equivalent of a Booker prize.
Between the Covers (May 16th, 2025) PSA Records
Bookmarks (Live)
Bandcamp: https://paularmfield.bandcamp.com/album/between-the-covers-9-songs-for-bibliophiles-2
Paul Armfield UK Tour Dates
Thursday 1st May: Mountbatten Hospice, Newport Isle of Wight
Friday 2nd May: The Arc Library, Winchester
Saturday 3rd May: The Story Shed, Swindon
Sunday 4th May: The Book Space, Cardiff
Tuesday 6th May: Bill’s Kitchen, Ludlow
Wednesday 7th May: Mostly Books, Abingdon
Thursday 8th May: Warwick Books, Warwick
Friday 9th May: Kontra Roots, Northampton
Monday 12th May: The Cluny 2, Newcastle
Wed 14th May: Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds
Thursday 15th May: Cafe No9, Sheffield
Friday 16th May: The Holloway, Norwich
Monday 19th May: The Green Note, London
Tuesday 20th May: Sevenoaks Bookshop, Sevenoaks
Thursday 22nd May: October Books, Southampton
Friday 23rd May: East Gate Bookshop, Totnes
Saturday 24th May: Edge Of The World Bookshop, Penzance
Sunday 25th May: Exeter Library
Tickets: https://paularmfield.com/events/upcoming-events/