Moseley Folk Festival enjoyed its eleventh time round the sun this year, with another cascade of troubadours ushering in autumn at Moseley Park.
Billy Bragg was welcomed back to the fold, headlining the Friday night stage alongside The Levellers. The Coral and Songhoy Blues took centre stage on Saturday – with The Proclaimers playing their last UK gig of the year to close the show on Sunday. Rumour has it Benjamin Francis Leftwich even spent his birthday in Birmingham, but this could be the cough syrup talking.
Outside the high echelons of festival billing, the first weekend in September saw a range of international and UK based acts coming to Moseley – from local luminaries such as Dan Whitehouse and Chris Cleverley, to pan-Atlantic performances from Sam Beam & Jesca Hoop, Laura Gibson and Mothers.
All in all, a damn fine fettle of folk to round off another festival season. Rob Hadley was on weekend’s the front line for Birmingham Review – happy snapping an extended picture spread to go into THE GALLERY.
Moseley Folk Festival will be back on the city’s suburban event’s calendar, with next year’s festival coming to Moseley Park 1st – 3rd September 2017. For more Moseley Folk Festival, visit www.moseleyfolk.co.uk
On first glance I wasn’t particularly excited by this year’s Moseley Folk Festival line-up. But how wrong I was.
Admittedly the headliners probably aren’t as captivating as last year (Spiritualised and The Monkees vs. The Proclaimers and The Coral), but scratch a little below the surface and you’ll find a real strength in depth in this year’s festival, which includes some of music’s most intriguing new artists alongside a selection of cherished favourites.
Mothers began as the solo project of Georgia-based visual artist Kristine Leschper, who wrote the majority of the songs for debut album When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired while finishing art school. Having recruited multi-instrumentalist Matthew Anderegg, guitarist Drew Kirby and bassist Patrick Morales, the band recorded their debut after playing together for just a month.
Leschper lists her influences as solo artists Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom, as well as experimental music, math rock, and noise artists, Lighting Bolt, Hella and Don Caballero. It’s a raw, unconventional, moving album and Mothers will be well worth a look when they take to the stage on Friday.
Sam Lee’s first career was as a ‘wilderness survival expert’. I guess folk isn’t a million miles away from the world of survival – both spheres are focused on traditional ways of life. Lee quickly found success in the music world, with his critically acclaimed debut album, Ground of its Own shortlisted for the 2012 Mercury Music Award, establishing him as one of the UK’s foremost folk stars.
Lee is most well-known as a specialist in the inventive reworking of the music of the Romany Gypsy and Irish traveller communities. He’s lauded as a one-off, an innovator. Though, with one of his songs providing the soundtrack to the trailer of the new Guy Ritchie film King Arthur, he could soon be reaching a much more mainstream audience. He will perform at Moseley Folk Festival with his regular band, Sam Lee & Friends.
It’s been a rocky time for politics in the past few months and who better to guide us through these troubled waters than Billy Bragg, the country’s most well-known political singer. He plays Moseley Folk Festival ahead of the release of latest album Shine a Light: Field Recordings from the Great American Railroad, a collaboration with guitarist Joe Henry that explores a lost American tradition. Expect a rousing Friday night set of folk and protest songs spanning Billy Bragg‘s 30-year career.
When Islamic extremists banned music in his hometown in Mali, Garba Touré grabbed his bag and his guitar, headed to the capital and formed Songhoy Blues. The band’s energetic live performances caught the eye of Damon Albarn, with one of their songs being included on a compilation released by his label African Express. Gigs in the UK and a record deal with Transgressive Records quickly followed and their debut album Music in Exile, produced by the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Nick Zinner, was released in February 2015.
The band has gone from strength to strength ever since, performing in festivals and shows all over Europe, including their very own sold out date at the Roundhouse earlier this year. The name says it all really – traditional West African music mixed with Jimi Hendrix and Beatles style blues, with a little bit of hip hop and R&B thrown in.
York singer-songwriter Benjamin Francis Leftwich lost the person he describes as his “number one source of inspiration” – his dad – to cancer in the intervening five years between his debut and new album After the Rain. As our interview with Leftwich from earlier this year shows, the impact of the death of his father is felt throughout the new album – due for release on 19 August, on Dirty Hit Records. Read our full interview with Benjamin Francis Leftwich from May this year.
Still, if ‘Tilikum’, its moving first single, is anything to go by, Leftwich has channeled his grief into a melancholic but optimistic piece of work. He will be hoping that the album garners the same success as debut Last Smoke Before the Snowstorm, described by The Fly as “majestic” and selling over 100,000 copies worldwide.
Moseley Folk Festival takes place on 2nd, 3rd & 4th September in Moseley Park. For more on Moseley Folk Festival, including online tickets sakes, visit www.moseleyfolk.co.uk
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I over play things. It’s a habit. And for one glorious summer Benjamin Francis Leftwich’s debut album – Last Smoke Before the Snowstorm, was the repetitive soundtrack to my earphone clad existence.
Alongside Like I Used To by Lucy Rose, and If You Leave by Daughter, these three debuts owned me for a solid six months – complicit and outright. And now with Leftwich’s follow up album poised to attack, the ‘eagerly awaited’ After the Rain set for release on 19th August, I prepare for predictability once again.
“I really appreciate that,” responds Benjamin Francis Leftwich, as I try to retain any sense of detached cool, “those two artists (Lucy Rose, Daughter) are close friends of mine and I know they’d be incredibly humbled to hear that as well. I know what you mean though; so many records of that genre were coming out then and everyone was on the same gig circuit and festivals – it was a really beautiful time and one that I’ll always cherish.”
Ah the halcyon days… But such an immediate impact can be both a blessing and a curse, with the pressures to jump even higher, especially on ‘that difficult second album’, often the antithesis to a healthy creative development. And more often than not, with the aforementioned being a triptych example, the make or break in this scenario can come down to the label.
“They’re amazing; I consider them family,” explains Leftwich – talking about Dirty Hit, his label for nearly a decade. “It’s a great home, they’ve allowed me to make the record that I wanted and needed to make. They’re just very music focused; I was almost going to say ‘tolerant’, but the people who work there have an amazing ear and ultimately they’re just music lovers who know more about how to make things work (industry) than I do.”
You do get a sense of camaraderie from the Dirty Hit roster, even from the outside looking in – like it’s more a friendly faced 4AD than a suited and booted Sony. “I’m not just saying that because we’re talking,” confirms Leftwich, “but the level of dedication goes so much further than just the music and song writing than I think people realise – it’s everything. When you’re working with an independent label like that, and you go into an office and there are five people running the whole thing… out of necessity it has to be inclusive, and song focused. And of course ambitious.”
Good to know. When my kazoo career is ready for takeoff I know where to send my demo. But it’s not all a garrulous love in at Casa de la Leftwich, as the five year hiatus between albums was the result of the illness and subsequent death of Benjamin’s father – a man the After the Rain press release describes as both ‘a parent and his number one source of inspiration’.
“…feel free to ask me what you want to ask me,” says Leftwich, as I stumble around the foundations of his latest endeavour. “There’s no question of me being offended. By ‘aspects’ do you mean things as well as the death of dad?” I do. It’s a poor choice of words, but how driven by that particular sadness was the writing process for After the Rain?
“It was hugely impactful, massively so. I’ve run through the timeline of it so much; I was with dad back in York, living in the house, and I loved that I could be there. Then I went on tour to America, which in hindsight I regret, but you know, that’s life. Then I came back and was writing in my room; me and my sister were there, sharing time.” Again the press release mentions this, how After the Rain’s opening track was ‘written in the living room opposite his father’s old house.
“We had producers coming up and setting up in the living room recording music, we had a full mixing desk in the living room at one point.” I feel like I’ve left my shoes on where I shouldn’t. But was it all about your dad?
“When something like that happens it’s more than just about that initial thing,” continues Leftwich, “it affects everything else around it. So that album (After the Rain) is massively inspired by it, and everything that followed. Not every song is about that – they cover a massive geographical and emotional range, but of course it’s a theme that runs though, and probably, subconsciously, maybe, ties them all together.”
Luckily for the sake of this conversation (and the apparent label goodwill) the first teaser from Benjamin Francis Leftwich’s new album is a superb return to form – the delicate but visceral ‘Tilikum’, which has been out in the public domain since early this year.
“The name of the song came from the name of the whale in the film Blackfish,” explains Leftwich, “and it’s a name that I was once planning on calling my baby… but that didn’t happen.” I remember ‘Tilikum’s opening six lines and choose not to ask. “And I wrote a song kind of explaining my thoughts about that and for the future. The chorus is just full of love.” The verses aren’t bad either; with a crafted sensitivity and robust pen, ‘Tilikum’ is arguably a step up from its predecessors. And that’s hard for me to say.
But there’s something else in Benjamin Francis Leftwich’s first release in half a decade, something evolved. Maybe it’s the time spent in between albums, maybe it’s the tragedy and catalyst, maybe it’s the Charlie Andrew production, or the “wider range of music than I listened to five years ago” and “sounds and textures from different records” that Leftwich references in his follow up. I honestly couldn’t say. And part of me doesn’t want to.
But with a 27 date tour before the album’s release – traversing Europe, America and Canada, and a date at our own Moseley Folk Festival, I’ll probably have enough time to find a suitably verbose suggestion.
