For track of the week we return to the eventually mellotron rising (way on later from when you hear piano accompaniment initially) and first track of Buoyancy the outrageously atmospheric Norma Winstone and Pablo Held co-write. Something of an instant classic in both the precarious and unsettling melody and the lyrics and very spooky vocal of Norma Winstone, the stunning 'Underwater Rendezvous' takes the breath away. Percy Pursglove's Wheelerian contribution on flugel is the icing on the cake. As for that eerie vocal dance to the music of time the effect is occult. ''Memories of childhood'' are that rendez-vous on a weightless song structurally all verse, no chorus. Beyond any direct context think of Edward Thomas (1878-1917) first, the great First World War poet, for purposes of delicacy and sense of both time and silence and above all rural Englishness not necessarily a benign picture postcard space but somehow a haunted landscape as well. Play the track first and read these lines as the song begins its own particular spell:
Only the sound remains
Of the old mill;
Gone is the wheel;
On the prone roof and walls the nettle reigns.
Edward Thomas 'The Mill Water'
Defer as well to his classic 'Adlestrop' - that is inevitable in a way given the power of Thomas' imagery:
Yes. I remember Adlestrop -
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
It's uncanny isn't it the match? And then you go read Philip Larkin and the title poem of 'The Whitsun Weddings' perhaps for a ''sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.''
Norma Winstone and pianist Will Bartlett have delivered an extraordinary magnum opus of a jazz treatment of Larkin's poetry very recently released incidentally - The Soundless Dark which you can read about here.
Norma Winstone, photo: press
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