The Memory Band - selections from Oh My Days

The Memory Band - By The Time It Gets Dark

In a decade which has seen a wide ranging and fruitful revival of interest in folk music, Stephen Cracknell's The Memory Band has established itself in that fine English tradition of slightly schizophrenic projects pointing in several directions at once which manage to find their place in the ever exciting independent music scene, popping up at several influential moments and though the marvels of technology finding audiences all around the World.

From the outset The Memory Band has embraced change and for its third album, Oh My Days, the ever-fluid line-up of The Memory Band has shifted once more, with a fresh emphasis on rhythm courtesy of the powerhouse team of bassist Jon Thorne from Lamb and drummer Tom Page of Rocketnumbernine, as well as an all-new vocal frontline featuring Jess Roberts, Jenny McCormick, Hannah Caughlin and Liam Bailey. Sam Carter, winner of this year's Horizon award at the Radio 2 Folk Awards, plays and sings on a number of songs, while there are contributions from names new and old; Nancy Wallace, Dot Allison, Sam Genders on vocals, guitarists John Smith and Pete Greenwood, bassist Jonny Bridgwood, string players Quinta, Rob Spriggs, Jennymay Logan and Laura Moody, Sarah Scutt on accordion and recorder, and Serafina Steer on harp. Oh My Days is a warmly-textured, delicately-balanced blend of the best elements from its predecessors.

The Memory Band - Love Is The Law

Liam Bailey: vocal
Hannah Caughlin: vocal
Jonny Bridgwood - double bass
Stephen Cracknell: guitars and production.
From the album "Oh My Days" and as featured in the film "Third Star"
available to download at: https://thememoryband.bandcamp.com/album/oh-my-days


The Memory Band - Demon Days

Stephen Cracknell: guitar, bass, cajon
Rob Spriggs: viola, violin
Quinta: viola
Jennymay Logan: violin

The Memory Band - Blackberry Way

From the album, 'South Wind,Clear Sky,' out now on Second Language Music.  www.secondlanguagemusic.com

Perhaps still most widely recognised for Dreaming With Alice, his 1972 psych-folk debut for RCA Italy as a 19-year-old art student-troubadour, Mark Fry has been turning his creative gaze on the world, and alchemising its elements into shimmering, quietly visionary works of art, ever since. Certainly not an artist who dances to the music of time in any conventional sense, Mark, a respected, and collected, painter, most often to be found holed up in his Normandy farmhouse studio, allowed more than three decades to glide by before recording Alice’s follow up, 2008’s Shooting The Moon. His subsequent musical activity has been frenetic by comparison.

Mark’s beguiling, Arcadian-flavoured 2011 Second Language album, I Lived In Trees, recorded in collaboration with The A. Lords – musicians from a more recent generation of psychedelic-folk experimenters – proved a major critical hit, demonstrating that Mark Fry’s musical stock lay not only in the Paisley-hued haze of his Aquarian Age youth, but also in the full glare of the postmodern, internet-facilitated present. A series of concerts in Japan and Scandinavia, and a widely reported ‘supergroup’ London showcase, featuring members of Mercury Rev, Super Furry Animals, Tunng and Lemon Jelly, further evinced the subtle but inexorable diffusion of the Mark Fry legend, something abetted by BBC Radio 4’s Today programme airing an interview with Mark in the wake of Trees’ release.

All of which brings us to Mark Fry’s latest, most exquisitely realised musical offering to date, South Wind, Clear Sky. Sung with that now familiar alloy of cool restraint and wondering innocence, and passingly reminiscent of the kind of English pastoralism associated with the likes of Kevin Ayers or Bill Fay, the album’s leanly arranged yet immersive songs are propelled by Mark’s glinting, plangent guitars and deliciously embroidered by John Parker’s double bass, Angèle David-Guillou’s piano and backing vocals and Katie Lang’s French horn, all bound together by producer Guy Fixsen (My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab) into a delightfully iridescent whole. For all its finely honed arrangements, and the translucence of its recording, South Wind, Clear Sky is still very much the work of the man who made Dreaming With Alice; the mature Mark Fry’s feeling for wonderment and magic, for the dreamlike and the innocently surreal, is just as pervasive, and persuasive here, only more focused, and etched against a more luminous, even heavenly canvas.

Where the lyrics on his last album found Mark reaching up through the summer branches toward an azure sky, here that celestial dimension provides the focus for eight shimmering chamber-folk essays whose wistful narratives of flight and fancy and empyrean romance purr and soar with a stately grace, like the ‘Aeroplanes’ of the album’s richly melodic opening track.


Mark Fry - Aeroplanes

W S Graham introduces and reads the poem 'Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons' (from his 1977 collection 'Implements In Their Places'). Recorded and broadcast circa 1978. 

W S Graham: Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons

In a decade which has seen a wide ranging and fruitful revival of interest in folk music, Stephen Cracknell's The Memory Band has established itself in that fine English tradition of slightly schizophrenic projects pointing in several directions at once which manage to find their place in the ever exciting independent music scene, popping up at several influential moments and though the marvels of technology finding audiences all around the World. 

From the outset The Memory Band has embraced change and for its third album, Oh My Days, the ever-fluid line-up of The Memory Band has shifted once more, with a fresh emphasis on rhythm courtesy of the powerhouse team of bassist Jon Thorne from Lamb and drummer Tom Page of Rocketnumbernine, as well as an all-new vocal frontline featuring Jess Roberts, Jenny McCormick, Hannah Caughlin and Liam Bailey. Sam Carter, winner of this year's Horizon award at the Radio 2 Folk Awards, plays and sings on a number of songs, while there are contributions from names new and old; Nancy Wallace, Dot Allison, Sam Genders on vocals, guitarists John Smith and Pete Greenwood, bassist Jonny Bridgwood, string players Quinta, Rob Spriggs, Jennymay Logan and Laura Moody, Sarah Scutt on accordion and recorder, and Serafina Steer on harp. Oh My Days is a warmly-textured, delicately-balanced blend of the best elements from its predecessors. 

The Memory Band - Love Is The Law

The Memory Band

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