Their name taken from a line in ‘Good King Wenceslas’, possibly referring to the Somerset village well established in 1820 by Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, a local MP, who named it after his youngest daughter, an established Christmas folk music tradition, Chris While, Julie Matthews and Chris Leslie don their festive jumpers once more for Flakes & Flurries, their seventh album, marking 30 years since they got together.
Again a collection of original and traditional material, it opens with While’s jauntily swaying autobiographically nostalgic ‘My Father’s Christmas Table’, telling how, with a dozen or more family members for Christmas Day her carpenter father said “let’s build a table fit for a feast” from an old washstand and oak door complete with “ a secret cutlery drawer”. The song ends twenty four Christmases on, her children grown with kids of her own, she now “the eldest at last, but that table still standing sturdy and stable”. I think you can work out the metaphor yourself.
It’s Matthews’ turn next to welcome ‘The First Snow’, yielding the album’s title and arriving “like wedding lace” to “drape the garden wall”, with no deeper meaning than the scene it describes. Sourced and sung by Leslie, ‘Hark What Music’ is a Cornish carol written by Thomas Broad that describes the angelic music announcing the birth of Jesus to the shepherds and was apparently popular among Cornish miners who sang it while traveling to America.
While’s second contribution is the piano-based ‘Watching Foxes’, a sketch of a winter’s night and her watching a mother and her cub visit the garden, the song about “another secret life…not so very far away”, and, is, in the usual sequencing of things followed by another from Matthews offering up a the fiddle waltzing ‘Christmas Wish’, another nostalgic reflection of times past with ‘It’s A Wonderful Life, Sally Army bands and carol singers, fair lights and festive garlands, but then poignantly turning into a song about missing those who are no longer and wishing she could “fill the empty chairs at the table”.
A coming together of Leslie and, ‘Carnac With Tunes’ begins with Leslie’s drone backed description of the Neolithic standing stones in Brittany and then transforms into ‘Breton Gavottes’, a lively fiddle instrumental adapted from the late Breton Celtic harpist Kristen Noguès, that builds to encompass piano and drums. Its back then to carols, first with While’s stripped to the bone, ruminatively picked five-minute reading of ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’ followed, in an uplift of pace, with Leslie taking lead on a Cornish variation of ‘Hark The Herald Angels Sing’.
Matthews brings Flakes & Flurries back to self-penned ground to ring out the ‘Christmas Bells’ and herald “the dawning of this special day of wonder” as they ring through the valley in their call “to chapel, to sermon and to prayer” before one final dig into the carol sheet for a galumphing almost reggae come wassail rhythm lope through ‘The Holly And The Ivy’ with the vocals interwoven into musical wreath bound together with puttering drums and Lesie’s fiddle It finally brings down the curtain with him taking lead on his own ‘It’s A Holiday’ with more talk of tables, holly, and family present and past. Another glittering bauble on the branches of their musical Christmas tree, may their fountain never run dry.
Mike Davies
Artists’ website: www.stagnesfountain.net
‘Christmas Wish’:
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