Darren Hayman Reissues “The Violence,” the Most Ambitious Record of His Career

Darren Hayman is reissuing The Violence (June 12th), the sprawling double album he regards as the most ambitious work of his thirty-year career. Originally released through Fortuna POP! in 2012 and recorded with his sixteen-piece ensemble The Long Parliament, it returns with previously unreleased songs and demos folded into the running order.

The reissue is the centrepiece of a wider effort to bring Hayman’s tangled discography into order. Records made under a run of different names, lineups and labels have left his digital catalogue in a bit of a mess, and over recent weeks missing titles from his work with Hefner, The French, The Secondary Modern, Papernut Cambridge and Emma Kupa have quietly reappeared through his own Belka imprint, alongside his debut solo EP Cortinaland. It follows the recent reissue of Hayman, Watkins, Trout and Lee.

“My digital back catalogue has been in a mess for some time, partly due to many records being released under different names, lineups, and labels,” Hayman says. “It’s so important to me to have this record available again. It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked, and I believe it sounds like nothing else in my back catalogue.”

The Violence closes Hayman’s Essex Trilogy, following Pram Town and Essex Arms, which dealt with the county’s new towns and its lawless countryside. Here he reaches back to the 17th century and the East Anglian witch trials carried out during the English Civil Wars.

“I have been drawn to my birthplace because it is both familiar and alien to me,” he says. “Essex is so close to London yet so remote from it in many ways. I want to be both brutal and tender about the place in my songs… I wanted to write about something in Essex’s past that spoke of its strangeness and also forced me to write in a language suitable for another period.”

Between 1644 and 1646, around 300 women were executed for witchcraft across Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk. Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed Witch Finder General, moved through East Anglia helping small communities rid themselves of these lonely, widowed women. The album holds that fear and isolation close, the way frightened societies turn on the weak and the outsider. “It’s about how violence frightens us and how fear just leads to greater violence,” Hayman says.

He widens the lens to the Civil Wars themselves, singing about King Charles I’s doomed love for his French bride, Parliamentarian spies, Puritan conviction and the comfort of animals. The Dedham Vale comes alive in intricate woodwind, trembling strings and the groan of destroyed church organs.

When KLOF wrote about The Violence on its release, we called it his best work to date. The reissue arrives alongside the digitally restored The Four Queens EP (out June 12th), and was originally paired with Bugbears, a companion album of 17th-century folk songs made with The Short Parliament for Fika Recordings.

From the album:

The Violence

It’s 1645 and Britain is at war with itself. The country is divided over religion and politics. The reckless King Charles has sought to challenge the power of Parliament and drawn dissent for his marriage to the Catholic, Henrietta Maria of France. Protestant Britain sees the King and his bride as ungodly and the Royalists see the Puritans and Parliamentarians as disloyal.

In troubled times, the frightened will see evil wherever they look. In the north of Essex, some saw it in the lonely old women on the edges of society.

We Are Not Evil

Evil never thinks of itself as such, and people can act cruelly when frightened. I assume that Matthew Hopkins, the self-named ‘Witch Finder General’ believed, on some level, that he was acting on God’s instruction.

In early 1645, Hopkins pushed his ear to his window and overheard conversations between supposed witches. Elizabeth Clarke, a one-legged, 80-year-old widow, was the first to be accused and arrested.

Hopkins claimed that 3 days and nights of ‘watching’ led Elizabeth Clarke to ‘confess many things’; furthermore, that his interrogation witnessed the summoning of numerous hideous imps and demons. Clarke confessed to sleeping with the devil and also pointed the finger at other women in the parish, including Anne West and her daughter Rebecca. All of these women were single or widowed beggars and perceived to be a drain on their communities. Hopkins began offering his services to other towns. For a fee, he would help rid these communities of their ‘witches.’