They arrive on trains, leave on planes and everybody stares at them. One might naturally assume this to be for their incurably wistful and bittersweet brand of California melancholy or the rich and beautiful vocal chemistry that exists between them, but it’s not; it’s actually because for all their flower-handling West Coast dreaminess the pair actually hail from Leicester. And though I’ve made a good number of stopovers at the bus terminal at Leicester’s St. Margarets, never once was I twenty-four hours from either Tulsa, Los Angeles or (providing you’re travelling with Scott McKenzie Coaches) to San Francisco. And if I was ever on any last train, it wasn’t to Clarksville but to Coventry.
The HaveNots – Liam Dullaghan and Sophia Marshall – both sing, both play guitar and they both write songs. They also both teeter precariously along the edges of incongruity. When we should be celebrating the joyful symmetry and romance of the marvellously breezy single ‘Flyers’, the obscurity and mournful sweetness of ‘Up Like Stairways’ and ‘Ghost’ or the tragic, haunting minimalism of ‘A Tiny Taste Of Death’ we’re instead left puzzled by the careless abandon with which (the lovely) Sophia Marshall places herself quite squarely in the middle of the road with such howling cod-country escapades as ‘Sweetest Feeling’ and ‘New Lace Dress’. It’s one thing following your instincts, quite another hauling your entire inspirational luggage through customs and onto the tarmac at Nashville International Airport. For Sophia Marshall’s part, well she more than redeems herself with some overwhelming vocal work on the fragile and understated ‘Undecorated’ and some heavenly harmonies on my favourite cut on the album, the chiming, circular and spine-tingling ‘Let’s Just Start Again’. The real find, however, is Liam Dullaghan, whose earnest, subtle strokes and gruelling lyrical intellect on all the slow acoustic numbers affords a really rather rich seam of ear magic and no shortage of memorable couplets (‘Stay away from boys with fireworks, they’ll set you off in the night/The sky’s the limit, escape is a cake with a fire door in it’).
Having already opened for bands like The Sadies (Yep Roc), lived out of vans and slept in railway stations as well as throwing in a head turning performance at the 2004 SXSW festival in Austin Texas it’s entirely possible that The Havenots may indeed make that leap from St. Margaret’s bus station to Los Angeles International this side of Xmas.