Bloke on the Water..

Earlier this week, I visited the Cariad IV narrowboat to record a few Goldfinches songs for The Narrowboat Sessions. For those of you unfamiliar with these sessions, they are an initiative run by Mark Holdsworth and his crew, offering “the biggest platform for unsigned, original acoustic music videos in the UK”. Every year, the Cariad crew travel “thousands of miles of the British Canal system recording different artists every weekday of the summer”, raising money for Cancer Research along the way. It’s a very cool and unique project. I took part in a session with John Slattery in August 2022 when we drove up to Shropshire and I remember the silencer fell off my exhaust pipe on the way! We sounded like a tank as I pulled up to a quiet canal-side location to make our recording in the remote countryside.

This summer, Mark and his crew had intended to wend their way down to Bristol (where Goldfinches would’ve joined them) but ill health, followed by a major canal breach in Cheshire, put paid to any ideas of travelling very far from the source. It was not possible for Goldfinches to drive up to Merseyside so, rather than cancel altogether, I decided to attend the session at Ellesmere Port on my own as I needed to drop off one of my daughters in Manchester anyway.

Cariad IV ‘stranded’ at the National Waterways Museum

It was great to see Mark again and revisit his tales of depping on keyboards for the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band and Gentle Giant (among others) and to learn more about his maritime past. (Bristol readers will probably know that the Bonzo’s Viv Stanshall brought the iconic ‘Thekla’ ship – when it was called The Old Profanity Showboat – from Sunderland to Bristol’s floating harbour during the 1980s, so there is a kinship – though a big difference in scale – between Mark’s snug floating studio and Viv Stanshall’s vision of a cabaret theatre on the water.) Working on the crew with Mark on this occasion were Cerys and Eli, of the Manchester-based horror-rock duo Body Water, who’d just discovered their latest single had been played on Radio 1! (Gosh, the talent on this boat!)

And then it was time for me to record my three songs: one brand new one and two from the Goldfinches album ‘Shanti Time’. I started with the new one, ‘Attenborough’, an homage to the broadcasting icon ‘Sir David’, played on my ukelele. This was a debut performance as Goldfinches haven’t had the opportunity to play it live yet and it was a challenge to remember all the words. However, I think I got away with it and the crew seemed to enjoy the performance! I then followed ‘Attenborough’ with ‘Queen of New York’ and ‘Shanti Time’, songs which I’m more familiar with, both performed on Mark’s lovely Washburn ‘Tahoe’ acoustic guitar.

To conclude, it was a shame Goldfinches never got to squeeze into the snug studio to record a set for the Narrowboat Sessions this year but I was happy to take one for the team! We hope to join Cariad IV next summer when the meandering musical journey will hopefully happen once more.

The Buddha of Crediton

As the singer-songwriter of Bristol Indie-folk group Goldfinches, I visited Tony Plato at Trobridge House (on the outskirts of Crediton) last summer to discuss the possibility of recording an album with him there, in the home he shares with Gina Williams. Tony is well-known locally, as a regular performer at the Moon Jazz Club in Crediton and also as the drummer of the CowPunk Americana band Yellabellies. As he was showing me around, I asked Tony where he’d acquired a very striking, large wooden Buddha which occupied a window-seat halfway up the stairs. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Tony had carved the Buddha himself! This happy discovery led to the Buddha becoming the centrepiece for the artwork of ‘Shanti Time’, Goldfinches’ debut album.

‘Shanti’ is the Sanskrit word for peace, a mood the album explores throughout many songs: it is also commonly found in the Eastern chant ‘om shanti’, used in Buddhist and Hindu prayers. As such, Tony’s Buddha seemed a perfect fit for the album cover and we photographed it from a low angle on the lawn in front of the house to exaggerate its size. But what about the Buddha itself? How was it made? I’ll leave it to Tony to pick up the story from here.

*Vaughan Gallavan sawing the Monterey Pine for Tony, in 1986*

“It was cut from a fallen Monterey Pine in Morchard Bishop by a friend, Vaughan Gallavan, in about 1986. He followed the chalk lines I drew on the section of the tree. I carved it in the front garden of our cottage in Crediton using a small brass Buddha that I brought back from India in 1980 as a guide. This Buddha is naked which means technically it is portraying a Bodhisattva, as Buddhas are normally draped in a cloth. I would get friends to pose for me, so it has Gina’s sister Anne’s knees, Steve Clarke’s back, my hands, etc as I wanted it to be somewhat androgynous. I knew this sort of pine had strong radial rays and so got Vaughan to rough out the piece I used so as to try and make the rays radiate from where the heart would be. I give it a new coat of linseed oil every decade or so.

I chose the cupped ‘Dhyana mudra’ position for the hands as it is the mudra for peaceful meditation. I gave the Buddha to my Mum who was converting a barn in Snodhill, Hereford, and it sat on a special shelf by her stairs for 35 years. She had been a practising Tibetan Buddhist for many years and would say her morning and evening prayers to it each day and I knew she would appreciate it the most. I knew it would be hard to part with it, so we held a Buddha farewell party and invited all our friends to say goodbye to it. It was a wild party in the end with many explosions! The Buddha came back to us here when Mum had to leave her house about 5 years ago and I think of her love for it and her prayers every time I pass it, as it lives half way up our stairs now. It was the first proper sculpture I made, apart from a whittled chinese dragon I made with a penknife. I have since mainly made things from copper or bronze.”

*Tony’s Buddha in its current home at Trobridge House*

Goldfinches are thrilled to announce that Tony’s Buddha will ‘manifest’ at our album launch gig at Crediton Arts Centre on Friday 6th June. It should be a very special occasion, bringing together the band’s Bristolian songs with the ‘genius loci’ of where the album was recorded. Our opening act for the evening will be Crediton’s very own Triffles, who describe themselves as “suppliers of sundry songs silly, sarcastic and (sometimes) sincere”. We hope to see you there.

Tickets are available now from the Crediton Arts Centre website.

Song Journeys: ‘The Salt Path’

As the film adaptation of Raynor Winn’s book arrives in UK cinemas this month, I thought it timely to publish a short video about the evolution of my song, ‘The Salt Path’, which was written after I read the book during the first UK Lockdown, in Spring 2020.

Do you remember that first month, from March into April? The weather was amazing but we weren’t allowed to wander far from home. It made Winn’s book even more compelling as her descriptions of nature and the great outdoors are so vivid and evocative. Reading it became a vicarious walk as well as an emotional journey.

I hope you enjoy this short video. Does anyone else recall these sky drawings (they happened at least once during Lockdown in our area) by a creative pilot, attempting to spread some joy? This one was filmed over Bristol; I wonder if they happened all over the country?

I haven’t watched the film of ‘The Salt Path’ yet. I guess I will but I never pictured the author and her partner ‘Moth’ as Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. That might be a bit too ‘Hollywood’ for this quintessentially English journey. We shall see..

Video for ‘Shanti Time’, by Goldfinches

click on the image to open the video in YouTube

This is a video for the title track of the forthcoming Goldfinches album, Shanti Time. I hope you enjoy it.

I shot the coastal footage last summer, in and around Sennen, near Land’s End, Cornwall. The band silhouettes were filmed later, in James Anderson’s house, by my daughter Grace. James then edited the band silhouettes over the top of my Sennen footage.

The story behind ‘Shanti Time’ is very much rooted in Sennen. I was on holiday there with my family a few years ago and we were staying in a house situated in an elevated position above the cove. I had already written the music and I was playing through the chords on my guitar as I looked out of the window of the ‘Shanti house’. (We gave it this name after learning that a children’s book we were all familiar with had been written there years before. The house features in the story and there were original watercolour illustrations from the book on the house walls.)

As I was strumming the guitar, one of my daughters commented that she was enjoying the music and I decided there and then that I wanted the song to quietly celebrate the peace we were all experiencing on holiday together. ‘Shanti’ is not only the name of the dog in the children’s book, it’s also the Sanskrit word for peace, so it seemed fitting to call the song ‘Shanti Time’. (It’s not the kind of shanty you might expect from a song about the sea!)

Most of the song lyric refers to things that happened during our holiday: from the considerable amount of time we took turns to gaze out of the “high bay window” through to the star-spangled night sky, where we would marvel at the fireworks from Land’s End reflected in the sea. I hope the sense of peace and wonder that we experienced on our holiday is communicated to you through the song.

There is a special guest on this recording (in fact, two special guests). Beth Rowley is a celebrated singer-songwriter from Bristol so I was very pleased when she agreed to contribute some vocals to the song. During the middle section, she and Hester Miller (one of Beth’s singing students) helped create a windswept oceanic atmosphere, as they joined in with the guitar solo, like Sirens singing from the swell of the waves.

Greetings from Windmill Hill.

*Shaun, John, James, and Paul*
Photo by Grace McCrindle

Every springtime on Windmill Hill, in Bristol, I hear the chatter and then see the gently bobbing flying formation of a charm of Goldfinches. Their cheering twitter heralds the arrival of spring – and hope – after the long, cold months of winter. I first began to notice them in our neighbourhood a few years back and when Shozzo decided we needed a better name for our modern folk ensemble Goldfinches felt like a natural fit.

Goldfinches is now my primary songwriting focus. The Shozzo trio recently became a quartet when we were joined by violinist Paul Meager. Paul doesn’t live on Windmill Hill but he doesn’t have far to travel for our rehearsals either. We are very much a south Bristol group.

These photographs were taken by Grace McCrindle, in a garden on the Hill, in winter. The goldfinches haven’t arrived yet but we are peering through the branches, looking forward to the return of spring. We also look forward to welcoming you to one of our gigs in the near future, as we prepare to launch our debut album, Shanti Time.