aaamusic | On 09, May 2011

 

Live at Kings Place  this Friday 13th May and UK tour  

 New Single ‘The Gap’ [One Little Indian, 6^th June Cat.No.1108tp7dl]

Listen here http://snd.sc/hTG1f8 

Debut album ‘The Days That Shaped Me’ out now.

“Has the potential to be a lifelong companion. It’s that good.” 5/5 Nick Coleman, Independent On Sunday

“Enough imagination and vitality to suggest they can write a substantial new chapter into the family history. And the presence of Kathryn Williams and James Yorkston won’t harm their appeal to an audience far beyond the folk fraternity.” ****Colin Irvin, fRoots

“An even mix of fragility, wonder and lyrical nuance… a gently beguiling collection.” ****Mojo

“A lovely low-key affair that pays tribute to their late mother, Lal. The evocations of childhood slip engagingly between the austere and the magical.” Neil Spencer, The Observer

“A brilliant new chapter in the family legend.” ****Nigel Williamson, Uncut

“Lal’s legacy lives on” ****Songlines

“A treasure worth mining for” Album Of The Week, The Independent Information

“A long-missed Waterson unveils a new-found song-writing talent” ****Maverick

“An important album” ****R2 

Marry & Oliver have an intuitive partnership but it was a long time in gestation before the sudden explosion of beautiful, evocative, mysterious songs which have blossomed on their debut album together, ’The Days That Shaped Me’.  A new single, The Gap is taken from the album on 6^th June following UK dates in May as follows:

5th May Royal Oak, Lewes, East Sussex
6th May – Bristol Folk House
13th May – Folk Union @Kings Place
14th May – Mellor Brook Community Centre, Blackburn
19th May – The Forge At The Anvil, Basingstoke
21st May – Platform, Glasgow

Lal Waterson’s death in 1998 had initially scuppered any thoughts Marry may have had of singing seriously again. “Mum always encouraged me to sing in the house, in the car or wherever we were and I always enjoyed the physical act of singing…in the first week after she died I could listen to her music, but after two weeks I couldn’t touch it. I couldn’t be around it and it took me nine years to be able to sing the music that had been the soundtrack to my life.”

The breakthrough came when the Waterson family were booked to appear at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 2007. When, accompanied by Olly, Marry stepped forward to sing one of her mum’s most celebrated songs, Fine Horseman, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house and a queue of people collared her afterwards to tell her she’d turned them into emotional wrecks (“how do you think I felt?” she muses). They all had a question too: when was she going to record an album? A Lal tribute show at London’s Cecil Sharp House later that year once more pitched Marry and Olly on stage together and the creative vein they’d both suppressed for so long was finally unlocked. New songs flooded out of them and they spent more and more time crafting them in Olly’s studio until one day, much to their own amazement, they realised they had an album.

Their mother’s influence is self-evident – one of the tracks Angels Sing is not only about Lal but includes some of her own lines, as does Rosy – yet it has a unique, genre-defying atmosphere entirely of its own. “Marry doesn’t have a musical training or any grounding in how things should be done so there are no rules and that creates its own quirkiness – something that was also there with mum,” says Olly. “I just sing whatever comes into my head and Olly helps me structure it,” agrees Marry. “Songs are about personal experience, about childhood memories, love, death, the various things we all experience…”

They include Curse The Day, which tackles the thorny subject of PMT, while the poetic vignettes of Secret Smile and The Gap encompass Perry Como, Doris Day and Jesus and the evocative imagery of Yolk Yellow Legged invokes a “buddleia day in the morning’s prime”, a “balletic Nureyev flair” and “beaded cobwebs on lollypop trees”. Magical stuff.

 

Yolk Yellow Legged was co-written by James Yorkston, who also duets with Marry on the track, while Kathryn Williams (who, like Yorkston, performed at the 2007 Lal tribute concert) co-wrote Father Us and Secret Smile, singing harmonies on both (repaying Marry’s favour of singing on the Lal-inspired Winter Is Sharp on Kathryn’s album The Quickening). Marry and Olly’s cousin Eliza Carthy is also prominent, playing fiddle on a couple of tracks and singing lead on The Loosened Arrow, while Reuben Taylor’s piano adds further textures, notablysetting the winsome, McGarrigle-esque tone of Run To Catch A Kiss. 

 

http://www.myspace.com/watersonknight