Right now, it seems that on every radio station, every TV channel, the suffocating whoops of the Glastonbury audience bounce from every speaker. Rightly lauded as a wonderfully diverse line-up this year, there’s still something a bit safe, a bit manufactured about so many of the acts on the main stages. There is even, heaven forbid, backing tapes and lip-synching. 200,000 people, doubtless, love every moment of it all, but somehow some of it feels a bit dishonest.
Just a few miles up the road in Bristol, that fiercely Rebel City, a duo have just released an EP that screams authenticity, that wears its honesty like a badge.
Josh Bowker and Lizi Morse have served time in The Longest Johns and Aggie Boys Choir respectively, singing sea shanties and perfecting a gorgeous a capella pairing. Their self-titled debut EP is, simply, wonderful; packed with unaccompanied songs that seem to sit inside of the traditional folk canon yet carry little snatches of a modern sensibility. These songs do what the best contemporary folk songs do – they become timeless.
If ‘The Hare’ is a traditionally folk animal then Bowker and Morse use it to explore the right to roam and express a boundless freedom. The two voices race across a sub-dappled field, Morse slightly behind Bowker, singing just off of him until their paths cross as they harmonise. His is a voice that is full of earthy depths, hers hitting sky-bound heights. Eventually, it is Lizi Morse’s voice that restlessly spirals, hypnotic and wild.
If the voices on ‘The Hare’ are purposefully out of kilter then the harmonies on ‘Whose Hands Are These’ are tightly clasped. These two fantastic voices are united in prayer, their fingers entwined together, creating something that is as bleak as it is beautiful. There’s desperation and devotion, Bowker and Morse raising a hymn to aging and vulnerability. As they sing together, there is a reassurance too, a sense that there is a genuine togetherness, that as we age, so someone will always be with us.
One of the duo’s stated aims is that, “they encourage people to learn and sing their songs as much as possible”, to include these new songs in the folk canon. To that end, all of the lyrics to each of the songs can be found on their Bandcamp page. If there is one song that will find its way to sessions and singarounds then it must be ‘I Am Proud’. Already a favourite at the folk singing session at the George & Dragon in Redfield, Bristol (that Bowker and Morse help to run), it is a powerful piece of feminist thinking. Based around the words of Sojouner Truth’s famous 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, it allows Morse to run the show. Bowker joins on the chorus but the power is all hers, the value seen in both reaping and sowing and designing and assembling is a full-blooded, empowering cry. This is a canonical work.
‘Harton Wreckers’ testifies to their background in sea shanties. It is a story of washed-up cargos and those that find it. Once again, these two voices are beautifully matched, the story unwinding slowly, Bowker the immovable rocks, Morse the silver-y siren song. There is strength and a quiet desperation, a world-weary understanding that things are tough and, sometimes, there needs to be an uncompromising edge. That feeling of a tough life is also seen in ‘The Fair Fight’, a tiny scrap of a thing full of character. Morse plays the perfect Dickensian heroine, smudged, golden-hearted and done-wrong, lapsing into cock-er-nee to gallop through the verses; Bowker lends his support for the choruses.
The final track on this brilliant EP is ‘A Quiet Place’, another one that the singers at the George & Dragon have taken to their hearts. It starts with the sounds of nature, the twitterings and murmurings of rurality, and gently unwinds into a Gospel for two voices. Rather than a dusty church, the chapel that these two celebrate in is the wide world, every wood and copse, every thicket and spinney. The samples fade in now and again, become louder, and nature takes its place in the harmonies. While the a capella may be simple, there is an untamed force that pulses through the whole song.
If Glastonbury’s main stages are full of multi-tracks and augmentation, more flash than substance, then this EP represents the exact opposite of that. It’s raw and truthful, vulnerable and tough. Over six songs, Bowker and Morse offer more honesty than any number of those overblown rock bands and blandly formulaic pop stars. In our ultra-processed, lip-synch loving world, this feels like an act of pure rebellion.
