A Lancashire-born singer-songwriter and sometime John Denver tribute act, Chris Bannister’s latest, The Calling Course, draws inspiration from his own family history with several generations of his family working in the coal mines of both Lancashire, and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, with many of the fictional characters in the songs linked.
Featuring Chris Nole on piano, Ken Nicol on acoustic and slide guitar, fiddler Deanie Richardson, cellist Caleb Yang, Martin Talbot on bass and Tipitina’s Debbie Jones on backing vocals, it opens with the swaying Celtic-coloured breeze of the fiddle stained, piano-led ‘Cape Breton Wind’, its miner protagonist singing “I was born on this island and so was my father/We spend our lives underground/He’s just 43, but they call him old man in this town… there’s carbon tattoos on my father’s skin/A rattle down deep in his chest/He stops on the stairs sometimes and he catches his breath” and of dreams of escaping that same fate (“that won’t be me cos we got a plan/And dying too young, ain’t the mark of a man/Meet me down by the lighthouse tonight/We’ll take that boat and row out on the bay”).
Nicol on slide, a bluesier, sparser note’s struck on ‘William You Lied’, acoustic and electric mingling on a song that paints a stark picture of suffering and loss (“Sister knocking at the door/Dad coughing in his sleep/My boy, starts his crying such a lonely sound/His mother one year in the ground”) and the black dog of depression (“Some days, I don’t know what I should do/Whatever angry star was guiding you/Is tearing me apart”). The identity of William and his lie remain a mystery.
With its shades of Denver, things are softer with the piano-led ‘Keep Us On The Road’ that conjures the often lonely life of a touring musician (“All them miles, under rolling wheels/Them smiles, and them split door deals/That fear, as I stand backstage alone… We’re not the first, won’t be the last/To have called this life our own/Now my old guitars are in their cases/I don’t remember names just faces/I’m older now so I move a little slow./She says ‘boy, gimme one more show’”). Family history is again the fount of ‘James Kildaire And The Maypole’, a storysong linking from “the cliffs of County Mayo/To the pits of Lancashire…Six shillings every day/Was the pittance we were paid”, of fate and a drunken brawl saving him from a mine disaster (the Wigan Maypole Colliery explosion in 1908), roving without purpose or direction for six years before enlisting in 1916 (“I’ve signed up for the front/In the hopes that I will not be seen again/Cos a man can live with anger/And a man can live with pain/And a man can live with bein’ a working slave/But I cannot live with a guilty mind/I cannot live with shame”).
Unaccompanied other than for muted drone, on ‘The Church’ the narrator tells how “The church was where my father preached/And lead the town in prayer/He spoke of shame and suffering/As something noble we should bear” but veins it with questions of faith and doubt (“My father was an honest man/But he always told me ‘son, the one thing that we never ask, is where did God come from?’”). The title track itself is a pulsingly moody guitar, fiddle and piano instrumental designed to create an impression of the sea, leading as such to Canada and the sprightlier, more sparkling but lyrically tragic and ‘O Eliza’, about fishing off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, the title a reference to a boat not a girl, the song speaking of a fearsome storm (“There’s a ship out on the horsebank in the storm/O Eliza, I’ve got a wife and children/And I pray that I may live to see the dawn./The stricken barque was run aground/Fought hard to reach her and the wind she howled… There was a but two of us survived/Next day I learned how many men had died/From the St Annes and the Southport crew/Some nights I hear them singing”). Despite the setting, it’s likely the story’s source is that of the loss of the Wells Lifeboat Eliza Adams in October 1880 in its attempt to rescue the Ocean Queen with only two of the crew surviving, though the song also mentions the St Agnes and Southport lifeboat stations, in Cornwall and Lancashire, respectively.
Separation and reunion vein the circling fingerpicked, piano brushed Denverish balladry Now Winters Here’ (“My heart lifts as this plane touches down/I see you through the crowd/I’m home/And I have never been the kind of man/Who wears his heart on the outside/No light gets past this armour/But oh to be with you again… My soul cries every moment we’re apart”), winter here it seems being a season of rebirth and a thawing of a frozen heart.
Set in Canada with hints of Neil Young, it enters the final stretch with the mournful fiddle of ‘The Wretched Ones’, the angry lament of a ‘half-breed son’ forced to suffer the hostility of prejudice (“You ought to think yourself lucky boy/It’s only cos of me you’re workin’/My father’s words/At the gates of the fourteen yard… You better watch your mouth boy/You better know your place/These men won’t tolerate/Lip from the likes of you”), tracing a history of racial abuse by colonisers |and missionaries (“ Our people knew the Northmen/They hauled their boats ashore here/Before the French and the British came… Before the cross and the rosary… Before the flag and the dollar bill/They called us the wretched ones”).
It ends on a quieter note with, first, the intricate guitar work of the bittersweet nostalgia and memories of ‘Valley Farm’ (“Take me back where the welcome’s warm/Sit me down beside the stove/Black as the devil’s heart/And we can talk and set things to right/Faces dim in the firelight/The dogs are sleeping the horses too/The moon in the window smiles”) and the loss that time and absence brings (“Time goes by like a train on a track/They’re gonna tell you don’t look back/Easy to say and hard to do…I still dream of the valley farm…but the valley farm forgot me”).
Finally completing the circle, the seven minute ‘New Waterford Morning’, named for the community on Cape Breton, connects the figure from the opening track with the land and people left behind (“I’m here, but you’re gone/And the fog on the water lets me hide from the sun/The old town couldn’t hold you, ain’t what she used to be/But New Waterford’s still home to me/Me and the boys we go out and we have us some laughs/But when I get home, I just stare at the phone/And it all comes apart pretty fast/I know I talked good game, tried too hard and I got myself lost/You read me like a book and now I’m here counting the cost”), the call of the past and the chains of the now (“I don’t do much, but I do what I can/It’s hard in the winter, with the wind and the snow/But New Waterford won’t let me go”).
Low key musically but with deep emotional resonance in terms of roots, heritage, history and bonds built and broken, Bannister says someone once told him that songs and poems are like statues of the working class; these are fine monuments indeed.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.chrisbannistermusic.com
‘William, You Lied’ – official video:
We all give our spare time to run folking.com. Our aim has always been to keep folking a free service for our visitors, artists, PR agencies and tour promoters. If you wish help out and donate something (running costs currently funded by Paul Miles), please click the PayPal link below to send us a small one off payment or a monthly contribution.
Thanks for stopping by. Please help us continue and support us by tipping/donating to folking.com via
You must be logged in to post a comment.