At first play through this sounded like a fairly typical two-blokes-on-acoustic-guitar collection of tunes but after a couple of plays it started to develop its own identity.
Radcliffe is the radio DJ and Knutsford resident, so we’re almost his local paper; David Boardman is his bandmate in FineLines.
A couple of songs drew me into the album: “Down The Steps” contrasts with much of the album, and sounds more Americana than UK folk, with percussive acoustic guitar providing a beat. It is about an underground bar (“beneath the pavement a world unfolds / down a flight of wooden stairs”), the song describing some of the characters who might be seen there (or were seen – there probably aren’t many rent collectors in gaberdine coats still working). I was in one such bar – maybe this very one – in Manchester last Christmas.
Another drinking hole features in “At The Bar San Calisto”, a different sound for a gypsy violin/guitar-led song about a bar in some foreign city – although while the music is different the characters are just as interesting and the narrator just as fond of watching them (“Hearsay, heresy, whispers going round / Fuelled by the strongest coffee and endless cigarettes”). This is the only song where the band really kicks loose.
“Moon Fishermen” is also more exotic, with percussion from the guitar and possibly a marimba; it could be about musicians who play late night gigs, leaving their homes mysteriously in the evenings and heading out for shows “back on the hunt for hopelessness” (anyone who’s played a gig and gone down badly will know what that means) but could also be about ne’er do wells out looking for crimes to commit, “They’re stealing in the shadowland to mount another night campaign”.
“Merchant City, Driving Rain” opens the album, the singers in harmony – songs alternate between one vocal and two – an American roots feel to it, you can image it is about Manchester or Liverpool with its talk of wet and wild nights (to whit, “merchant city, driving rain”), although use of “dreich” suggests Glasgow, while “On Euston Road” is more clear in its geographic location; this slower song has Radcliffe (or maybe Boardman) singing solo; the song ends with traffic noise that sounds nothing like Euston Road but does sound more like BBC Traffic Sound Effect No 23.
“Steal The Sea” is another harmony and about the Manchester Ship Canal – as you all know in 1882, a meeting of Manchester businessmen resolved to create a canal to enable sea-going ships to reach Manchester, giving them access to slave-produced cotton and give a land-locked town a port. The song both celebrates the achievement but also the downside – poorly paid workers (“18 hundred and 82 / We’ll harness all the worker bees”) and also that Manchester’s success was on the back of enslaved people forced to grow the cotton.
Having walked the Pennines over Manchester and looked back from bracing hillsides and seeing the city below in the distances suggest that “The Long Ridge” is The Pennine Way (“Out of town, the long way round, new trails begin / Over the bridge, out on the ridge”) even though there is reference to “a lone star state of mind”.
Standout is the closing track. “The Not So Grand Hotel” opens with no instrumentation and reference to Woody Guthrie’s “This land is not my land”, a song written in protest at “God Bless America”, which Guthrie thought was an out-of-touch populist song remote from the harder life of poorer Americans.
The line “a wave of them they came / an underclass, the broken glass / the spitting of the bile” suggests that last summer’s riots inspired the song, the lyrics expressing embarrassment (“Woody be my witness, this land is not my land”). Despite the fact that Guthrie was expressing support for the working man, this album leans less towards locals facing a hard life and more towards the migrant: “A sailor came ashore he did, a sailor came ashore / Terrified, the other side should come as sweet relief / But no new dawn, a perfect storm is ready to take hold / No kindred spirits here among the beggarman and the thief”.
See radcliffeandboardman.com, with all lyrics available there, too.
It is out on Talking Elephant (talkingelephant.co.uk).
