Johnny & Lillie Flynn have announced Beam Cottage, their first collaborative album, due 6th November via Transgressive Records.
To mark the announcement, they’ve shared a new version of “The Ghost of O’Donahue” featuring the South African vocal group The Joy. Their mother was from South Africa and so, the siblings say, “to have these incredible voices singing in Zulu and weaving with ours felt like a conversation with a culture we knew and loved from childhood”.
The track first appeared as a bonus track on Johnny’s 2008 album A Larum. It was written in Ireland almost 20 years ago but is now cast in a meaningful new light. “I went to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin and thought I saw a painting called or about a story named the ghost of O’Donoghue,” Johnny says. “I wrote this song in the back of the van looking out over the lush greenness of Ireland and thinking of my own family’s journey away from Ireland.” Then, last year, he discovered the writing of the Irish sage John O’Donoghue. Playing at a festival in Ireland, the author Manchán Magan approached Johnny and told him he liked his song about O’Donoghue. Magan told Johnny that he visited O’Donoghue on his deathbed in January 2008, at exactly the same time Johnny first wrote the song. Johnny became friends with the Irish author, before he died at the age of just 55 last October.
Produced by Charlie Andrew (Alt-J, Marika Hackman, London Grammar), the album reworks songs from Johnny’s catalogue alongside new material and cover versions that the siblings grew up singing, including folk songs such as Hares on the Mountain (Johnny chose the Shirley Collins and Davy Graham as a favourite Road Trip Song in his 2013 KLOF Mag Mixtape–more below), and Idumea, made popular by The Watersons and The Young Tradition.
The album title refers to their childhood home, a cottage in a sleepy southern England village that the press notes: played host to almost 400 years of life and death under its thatched roof. “We rented the cottage – our parents weren’t wealthy, and they never owned a house together – but when we remember a childhood home, this is it.” Johnny’s music scholarship took him to boarding school and soon after, Lillie moved with their parents to Wales to run a B&B. At 62 years of age, cancer took their father Eric from them. “The years at Beam Cottage feel like an idyll of happiness and togetherness before life began to feel more complicated and we were separated from each other.”
The fourteen tracks include covers of Hank Williams, Billy Bragg, Paul Simon and Johnny Mercer as well as a lullaby their father wrote, titled Sleepy Head, which closes the album. “He would sing us to sleep with it as he had done with our three older half-siblings 20 years before us.”
Johnny & Lillie Flynn play London’s Royal Festival Hall on Saturday 21st November.
Those who pre-order the record via Johnny’s store will get access to an exclusive ticket pre-sale for the show. This first ticket pre-sale will take place on Weds 19th August at 10am BST with general on-sale following on Friday 21st August at 10am BST.
Bandcamp | Johnny Flynn’s Store
Beam Cottage Tracklisting
- The Music of the Spheres
- The Ghost of O’Donahue (featuring The Joy)
- The Boy In the Bubble
- The Lady is Risen
- Tell Old Bill
- Moon River
- Rambling Man
- Brockwell Park
- Hares on the Mountain
- Between the Wars
- Dink’s Song
- Idumea
- Been Listening
- Sleepy Head
Johnny Flynn’s Songs for the Road
In 2013, Johnny Flynn put together a Mixtape of songs he liked to listen to while on the road. Among them was Shirley Collins & Davy Graham’s “Hares On The Mountain“, one they cover on the new album. Talking of Collins, he told us, “Her voice was golden and there was no way Shirley was going to follow the rigid approach laid down by the likes of Ewan MacColl’s The Critics Group. She helped push British Folk music in new directions and that influence is still obvious even today.”