‘We’ve got a handful of songs to sing you, Can’t stop my voice when it longs to sing you. New songs and blue songs. And songs to bring you – happiness.
No more, no less.’
Or so sang that couple of cheesy oddballs, Maria Morgan and Keith Field to millions of preschool children who had tuned in to ‘watch with mother’ for the best part of the 1970s. Keith always
had the guitar and sported dreadfully oversized wing-collars outside of his
denim jacket and Maria sat there smiling in her colourful Laura Ashlies with
her dress raised just ever so tantalisingly over her knee. It was a harmless
daily serving of little mice in windmills, owls and pussycats and melancholy
magic dragons. We never considered for one minute whether Keith was slipping
Maria a length after the credits had rolled or whether either of them was on
drugs. We just took their sleepy-time lullabies for what they were: the stuff
of nonsense – charming, inconsequential and as meaningless as a bag of daydreams.
And it’s a similar proposition here
After a four-year separation, husband -&-wife team Alfred and Laura Darlington
reunite for a project that’s as gentle as a daisy, as crazy as a cucumber and
as hip a fortnight in Rio de Janeiro; an inevitable state of affairs given that
Alfred Darlington is none other than experimental music producer, Daedelus
(he of avant-electronics and cutting-edge hip-hop aesthetics) and Laura is
an equally screwball producer in her own right. But whereas most estranged couples
might arrange a mini-break in the Lakes to recover some past romantic form,
this pair embarked on a musical collaboration that melds the beautiful tapestries
of Bossa and the dabbling peculiarities of toytronica. On the one hand we have
Laura purring as contentedly as the cat who got the cream and on the other we
have Alfred’s stiff yet queerly supportive baritone looming like some old English
gent over the fragile bodice of sweet cockle-bearing Molly Malone (alive-alive-oh).
It’s not an electric album by any means. There are harmoniums, flutes, violins
and treated piano strings but no synths. It’s an album characterised by chattering
arpeggios, offbeat dyslexic rhythms and swooning whispers – Laura’s pure and
plaintive voice seldom swelling above a sigh and alluding to a lifetime of twitching
at curtains and literary exchanges at midnight. Although hazardously earnest
and unintentionally comic on occasions (like when Laura starts ‘meowing’ on
‘Cat Fancy’) it’s clearly very smart and perceptive, an attempt to address the
complex tapestries of love and loving without recourse to the usual tricks and
devices of the traditional pop genre. Love is as much about farting as fucking,
the subtext postulates. Sure she sounds like someone coming round from the effects
of a general anaesthetic but it corresponds rather well to the ruminative and
desultory shape of the music and its magical repository of folk-tales, fishy-tales
and cats called ‘Thistle Blossom’.
Pretentious? Not really. It’s far too frivolous for that and the sheer volume
of small domestic details (breakfast in bed, getting drunk and playing Balderdash)
brings it emphatically down to earth. Preposterous, yes, but not pretentious.
If anything it strips away the usual conceits of romance and makes the most
facile of things seem quite magical.
Music crafted from the roots of rosehip bushes and the silky wings of moths
fluttering around the Night Light. A curiosity all round.
Suggested downloads:
’The Art of Kissing’ (a bit like dropping acid whilst cross-stitching
and listening to the Archers)
’Amiss’ (Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz get exported to Los Angeles)
’Finders Keepers’ (military drum and toy xylophones – like being locked
in a toy-shop overnight. Haunting yet pretty)