Another late bloomer in terms of recording, after some 20 years writing music, singing and, more recently, playing ukulele, Reading’s Tuthill (an insight analyst in her day job) has finally got round to her debut album, Beautiful Disaster, produced by Ed Harcourt, who also plays piano and everything other than uke, her music ranging from folksy strum to Americana sways and catchy indie pop, her voice often sounding like some 20-year-old ingénue.
It opens with the keyboards-based ‘Until You Tell Me Not To’, inspired by a story on BBC 1’s Ambulance series, is a quietly poignant song about despair and attempted suicide (“All but a silhouette of a woman’s name who I forget/ Standing by the banks of the Thames/The people pass her by but nobody stops to ask her why/She’s been there for hours/We’re all too busy to see/Just how lonely one person can be/And then she walks into the cold and dirty water/With her coat done up, handbag by her side… We never mean to let go/We just simply slip below”). The story had a kindness of strangers happy ending as a passer-by stopped to lend a hand, the line “I’ll stay until you tell me not to” quoted verbatim.
Switching style with a percussive handclap rhythm, thumping drum and ukulele, ‘The Space Between’ is a particularly infectious number but also addresses a similar theme of life in limbo (“All we are is the space between/Those that win and lose and dream/All we are is the space between/ Shadows walking, ghosts’ unseen/Where did we go?… And It can all mean nothing, if you’ve nothing left to do/Or It could be your everything, if you want it too”). All we need to do is find our It.
Reminiscent of Thea Gilmore, the punchy, rhythmically driving ‘Evolution’ is a sharp put down (“You take forever just to say nothing/You’re like a myth/You’re like a myth you made up of yourself/You can make no mistakes and still lose/You can miss the choice but you still choose”), written after hearing a speech by Trump but quite possibly directed at her younger self, the pace slowing down for the waltzing sway of ‘Fuzzy Love’ that, written at a songwriting retreat with Kathryn Williams who sings backing vocals, is a slowly gathering (anti) love song of emotional ambivalence and uncertainty (“my smile, is no more than veneer/ Watching you play with the words that you say/I feel miles apart although joined at the heart”).
Keeping it folksy, ‘Blood In The Water’ touches on mental health issues and depression (“The pressure’s building, and darkness swallows me whole/And the voice in my head says “no one else can know”, “no one else can know”, “no one else can know”/A flicker of madness, in a broken mind… we just wander through life, looking for a sign”).
Arranged for stately piano with violin by Gita Langley, ‘One True Love’ is, as you might image, a love song (“I can’t see you, but I know you’re there/I can feel you, breathing on my hair/No one else can ever be the same/Cried for help and you’re the one that came”), giving way to the whimsically breezy ukulele-backed title track which, with its “Doo Doo Doo Doo” and Harcourt on saw and cigar box side, is basically a love song to those frustrating constant screw ups (“You drive a hundred miles an hour but you still run God damn late/Blame the traffic or the weather and forget that it’s your trait/You play with fire and then wonder why you sometimes still get burned/Like a naughty kid that seems to never really learn… I gave a million reasons not to but you still went straight ahead/You seem to think that love exists inside a total stranger’s bed”), However, despite everything, she declares “I could meet everybody in the world and I still wouldn’t swap”), the song coming with the insightful relationships wisdom of “Sometimes we push people away just to see if they come back/And if they don’t we know that maybe they were running on a parallel track”.
Set to a scuffling percussive beat, strummed uke riff and flourishes of tumbling drums, ‘Oddly Specific’ (and here I’m thinking Tanita Tikaram) is kind of the same idea in reverse, whereby despite all herself-identified faults (“I could walk a thousand miles, but I’d moan about it every single step/I could read a thousand books, but I’d forget every word I ever read/I’m not as smart as you may think/I’m not the rock that doesn’t sink/I’m not a lighthouse in your storm/I lost my temper with you, and I’m sorry that I do”), it still given unconditional love (“I could break a thousand windows, but you only see the good in all my bad”). It’s also certainly the only song to ever mention Ashera kittens.
Michele Stodart guesting on bass, the stripped back, spare ‘The Last of Us’ was inspired by playing the video game upon which the post-apocalypse TV series was based, giving rise to lines like “Where did you go? (I) was running from the outbreak/Why did you stop? (I) was picking up a keepsake/You by my side on a long lonely ride to the end… Broken but free, and nothing can survive us/So we kissed over the choir, of a world on fire”.
Built around a circling guitar line with a vague Eastern European gypsy flavour to the rhythm and distant echoey guitar, ‘Play On’, again inspired by the same game, has a Cohenesque air to a song couched in hard choices, loss and regret (“Well I’ve walked through the mountains and the valleys/God I’ve felt every step of the way/And I’m cold right down to my bones, my soul/But I couldn’t have lived if I stayed/I hate myself, not enough to change/Cause his name, forms a shrine/And revenge, as a plan, cost me everything/As I live, with a shadow that’s not mine …I got everything I wanted, it was not needed/What I’d give, for us now just to talk”), the refrain “Play on my girl, play on/Stay strong my girl, stay strong”, the narrator’s encouragement to themselves.
The core ideas there continue into the catchily simple strummed uke ‘Safe Space’ (“As we stand upon the shoulders of giants/I paint a picture of someone I am not/And in the shape of my recovery, you just disappear/As I fill my head with emptiness and rocks”), but with hope and the positivity of recovery at its heart (“take this safe space/As something we can share/Until we meet again…I hug you longer than the rest ‘cause I needed to/I hope you don’t mind that I lingered past the norm/It takes a moment just to settle, and then I feel the warmth/And my heart just seems to weather through the storm”).
Spidery fingerpicked and acoustic, with double tracked vocals and again hints of Cohen, written during the pandemic, ‘The Machine’ is a particularly dark number about the way all the effort that goes into creating something can be treated so superficially (“You made it sound, like rainbows and butterflies/Have you not seen, the blood, sweat and failed tries?/Or did you miss the moments in between?/Blinded by darkness, distracted by the light/Toppled by one punch but they never saw the fight/Written on paper that slowly decays to the land”) with as “The Machine Clockwork Engine Gone unseen” with life a series of abandonments and disappointments (“ we The Machine Chase the invisible/Chase the dream/All of the ones, that you lost along the way/Weren’t in the plan, they were never here to stay/Building you up before they let you go”).
Beautiful Disaster ends on an equally downbeat note with the Tikaram-toned folksy uke-strummed, piano and echoey background vocals of ‘Bruises’ and a theme of emotional abuse (“You said you loved me but the bruises take longer to heal/You said you’re sorry but the fear in my heads just too real/And every time I see your face/Takes me back to the time and place, where life, stood, still”) and that self-inflicted inability to escape (“You said you’re lonely but you never made it past the front door/Said you want it but you never really look for more/Every time that you concentrate/Gets a little messy and complicated, and you, stand still”). A hugely impressive debut that is hopefully just the beginning. To borrow her own words, “Play on my girl”.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.jesstuthill.co.uk
‘The Last Of Us’ – official video:
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