Bring Your Own Hammer (BYOH) returns with two new singles, both out now via Dimple Discs. The project pairs composers with historians to make new songs from the documented history of nineteenth-century Ireland and its diaspora. BYOH calls itself a faction rather than a band, group or collective: where nineteenth-century factions gathered armed with sticks and wattles at fairs and markets, this one is armed with voices and instruments, set on reinterpreting historical material in song. The stated aim is to recover, or carefully imagine, the inner lives of people who survive only as snippets in the archive, the ones histories tend to leave in the margins. We first covered the series in 2022, when Adrian Crowley and Brigid Mae Power shared Golden Streets, Bitter Tears, and have followed it through Carol Keogh’s A Pair of Packed Valises (before the Dunbrody), 1849, but I encourage you to visit their Bandcamp, where you’ll discover lots more.
The Cruel Father comes from Lavinia Blackwall and Neil Farrell with SJ McArdle, drawn from an 1860s ballad about Richard Guinness Hill. He and his wife were travelling from Dublin to London when their son was born, and the birth threatened to cost Hill part of his wife’s fortune. Days later he left the infant with a woman in Drury Lane. The boy was rescued two years on from what the record calls “a loathsome den,” having been raised among thieves and beggars. Hill was charged with wilfully falsifying the birth register but never convicted. The track will appear on From The Tombs, an upcoming BYOH double album of 21 songs following crime, law and order through nineteenth-century Ireland and its diaspora.
The Girl from Spark’s Lake is sung by Sophie Coyle and tells the story of ‘A.M.’, a girl her own father asked magistrates to send to a reformatory in the early 1860s. Described as having a “roving and unsettled disposition” and accused of theft and keeping bad company, she was sent to the Spark’s Lake reform school in Co. Monaghan, then slipped away during prayers to go looking for bird nests and bluebells. BYOH credits Dr Geraldine Curtin, author of Young Offenders: Children and Crime in Ireland, 1850–1908, for the source the song is built on.
Both songs do what the project sets out to do. Hill survives in the record as a court case; ‘A.M.’ as a magistrate’s complaint and one telling detail. The songs hand them back what the archive withholds: a voice, a motive, an interior life. Coyle’s girl, climbing the reformatory wall after bluebells, is exactly the kind of figure who usually disappears from history altogether.
Lavinia Blackwall sang and arranged across seven albums with Trembling Bells, launched her solo career with Muggington Lane End in 2020, and released her second album, The Making, in 2025. Neil Farrell, a Galway musician and producer, was a founder member of Toasted Heretic and records solo as The Melancholy Thug; he featured earlier in this series on Eileen Gogan’s The Female Cabin Boy. SJ McArdle is a songwriter and curator known for his 2022 album Old Ghosts In The Water and its accompanying stage show, PORT. Sophie Coyle, a singer-songwriter, illustrator and horticulturist based in Dundalk, earned nominations for her 2018 debut Blame Me for the Storm and followed it in 2024 with Cuentista, a set of songs in Spanish and English drawn from a journey through South America.
From The Tombs gathers more than twenty contributors, among them Sean O’Hagan, Luke Haines, Bernard Butler and Brigid Mae Power (more details soon). Both singles are out now on Dimple Discs/Bring Your Own Hammer.