Brown Wimpenny, the eleven-piece folk collective split across Manchester, London and Liverpool, share their experimental take on Raglan Road today (3rd March) via Broadside Hacks Recordings. The track is taken from a forthcoming debut album, details of which are yet to be announced.
The collective takes its name from a distant 19th-century relative of tenor banjoist Seth Lockwood’s, and grew from informal Sunday jam sessions in his Manchester living room. At their peak, they numbered 25 members before settling at their current count; early gigs saw the band fill half the room, lyrics passed out to audience members as part of a conscious effort to collapse the distance between performer and crowd.
Raglan Road — Patrick Kavanagh‘s poem of longing and loss was immortalised by Luke Kelly, co-founder of The Dubliners. Kavanagh asked Kelly to sing it, which he set to the music of Fáinne Geal an Lae (The Dawning Of The Day), a tune described by the late Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains as a “perfectly constructed tune, calm, not contrived…something that comes out of you automatically”.
Kavanagh wrote the poem while living on the Raglan Road in the 1940s; he became infatuated with Hilda Moriarty, then a medical student from County Kerry. While she didn’t share his romantic feelings, he promised to immortalise her in poetry.
Claddagh Records released ‘Almost Everything…‘ a few years ago, a tribute album to Patrick Kavanagh (tracks are featured in our Claddagh Records Mixtape here). On the liner note introduction to that album, James Morrisey, the Chairman of Claddagh Records, opens:
For many of us, Patrick Kavanagh joined our life’s journey as we sat at hard desks in cold classrooms struggling to make sense of so much.
Kavanagh made poetry real. He opened our minds to life, soil and soul.
For Brown Wimpenny, they first encountered those opening words: “On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew/That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue…”, in Manchester pub sessions among members of the Irish diaspora.
The band explain their approach:
“The song never fails to make somebody cry and is regarded as one of the finest, most complex love songs in Irish folk music. It’s a tough song for a young band to tackle, but we wanted to do a version of it because of the mad, experimental, Joycean lyrics.
First penned by Patrick Kavanagh in the 1940s and put to the truly ancient tune ‘The Dawning of the Day’ by Luke Kelly (whose version remains unsurpassed). It’s really a tragic song about loneliness, an existential sort of heartbreak that we think speaks well to the loneliness of our generation, where love is sometimes seen as a painful risk — futile, bound to disaster and best avoided. But it’s also about joy, memory, and the wonder of being in love.
Few folk songs have emotional reach like this. We created a dense wall of sounds that tries to capture all that sonically. Our arrangement probes the relationship between cacophony and beauty; attempting to show that by sitting with chaos and perpetual change, we can find a new cohesion.”
While cacophony and beauty form a framework for their approach, it’s more like a fog lifting and the sun shining through…bridging joy and sorrow, capturing Kavanagh’s “life, soil and soul” in a wondrous way that mirrors their message of finding a new cohesion. Really impressive, and wonderfully addictive to listen to.
Raglan Road is out now via Broadside Hacks Recordings. Stream it here: https://brownwimpenny.lnk.to/RaglanRoad
Upcoming Live shows:
10 APR // London, Piehouse Co-op
1 MAY // Stroud, Neo Ancients festival