A decade or so ago, I imagine if I’d run in to Fisherman’s Friends while enjoying a beer and a nice fat crab sandwich in a Port Isaac pub I’d have passed a happy evening and possibly returned the next night.
In later life Gustav Metzger appeared a marginal, eccentric figure. The diminutive, white-bearded artist, was often to be seen round London’s galleries in the early to mid-2010s, dropping off piles of hand-produced fliers urging his fellow artists to “remember nature”.
Uncut, lovingly restored, and with two intervals in the antique manner, Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers invites its audience to embark on an epic voyage as well as a momentous one. This summer’s Glyndebourne Festival visit to the Proms brought us the rediscovered opera about a pious, paranoid community of Cornish ship-scavengers that the trail-blazing Smyth – who judged it her signature work – laboured over for several years before its premiere in Leipzig in 1906.
“The historic, the prehistoric, the natural, architectural, geological, ornithological, or on the side of its folklore, Christian or heathen – the place teems with subject matter that is as curious as it is interesting.” So the Gothic Revival architect John Dando Sedding wrote of Cornwall in 1887.
For those wishing to avoid the bloated plutocracy of #PlattyJoobs, the Great Estate Festival was the perfect antidote. Set in the beautiful estate of Scorrier House in Redruth, Cornwall it is described as “the most rambunctious garden fete”.
Interesting for the history of music, but not for music? Passing acquaintance with Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, a grand opera by a woman at a time (the early 1900s) when circumstances made such a thing near-impossible, had suggested so. Then along come Glyndebourne’s music director, Robin Ticciati, and a team dedicated to two years’ research in putting the full original together, including an extra half-hour of music not heard before, and it turns out to be more than that.
When it was announced that Ben Wheatley would be directing a new version of Rebecca, his fans must have wondered what kind of exciting damage he would do to the neo-Gothic template of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel – and how he might spin the material in a different way than did Alfred Hitchcock in his unimpeachable 1940 classic starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson.
Minutes into Make Up, Claire Oakley’s auspicious first feature as writer-director, unearthly sounds welcome unwitting Ruth (Molly Windsor) to her intimidating baptismal adventure as an 18-year-old who's not so much bi-curious as bi-phobic. A nail-biter to begin with, she’s soon hearing and seeing portents of horror everywhere, not least on the tips of her fingers.
Mark Jenkin’s black and white masterpiece about clashes between incomers and locals in a Cornish fishing village was made on a 1976 clockwork Bolex camera that doesn’t record sound – all that’s added later, including the actors’ voices – and hand-processed by him in an old rewind tank in his studio in Newlyn.
There was a hint of what was to come in Gwenno Saunders’ debut, Y Dydd Olaf. It was, for the most part, a Welsh-language affair, save for the closing track “Amser”, a song sung in Cornish and the album’s dizzying slow dazzle. For her follow-up, Le Kov, Gwenno has chosen to record an entire album in this Brythonic language that has, in recent times, gamely rallied itself from UNESCO-declared death.
Le Kov, then, exists as a document of a living language, albeit one that the majority of listeners will have no working knowledge of. In order to make real sense of the songs, we have to do the reading as well as the listening – we’ve been dropped off in the middle of nowhere and asked to find our way home with a book and a map rather than a Sat Nav app.
This is, in some ways, a more assured album than its predecessor
That’s not to say that Le Kov is hard work – far from it. The sonic landscapes that these story songs inhabit are accessible: new, but posessed of a faint familiarity. It all makes sense when one realizes that the translation of the album’s title is “the place of memory”.
This is, in some ways, a more assured album than its predecessor. While there are still shared reference points with the likes of Broadcast and the Soundcarriers, there is also rare sophistication and scope at play. Opener “Hi a Skoellyas Liv a Dhagrow” (“She Shed a Flood of Tears”) boasts the sort of perfectly picked bass playing and soaring strings that one would expect of a vintage Vannier/Gainsbourg production, while the subtle shifts in “Herdhya” (“Pushing”) posses a delicate, electronic refinement.
The more propulsive moments are equally as impressive. “Eus Keus?” is glorious pop, with chiming, chourused guitars and a joyus refrain, while the melody of “Tir Ha Mor” (“Land And Sea”) positively surges, rising and falling with palpable emotional weight. “Daromres y’n Howl” (“Traffic In The Sun”), which sees Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys joining for vocal duties, is another quirky pop masterpiece: mid-paced, but as far from middle-of-the-road as it’s possible to be.
At a time when we’re headed towards post-Brexit cultural hegemony, Le Kov is a wonderful celebration of a rich and diverse culture. Gwenno carefully frames the unfamiliar and, in doing so, shows us how stories can be told in different tongues, and yet be steeped in a shared language.
@jahshabby
Overleaf: watch the video for "Tir Ha Mor"