Tag: Damian Hall

Recruiting his Oxford-based son Ben on vocals, along with verbal and visual reflections by twenty artists and twenty writers (Kevin Threlfall and Damian Hall among them) for the booklet, drawing on his experience working in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, Jon Avison has assembled Wild Wisdom, a ten song celebration of its walking trails and, by association, nature itself.

Jon taking lead, Ben on guitar alongside Phil Kay and Merlin Matthews as rhythm section, it opens with the jaunty pop-folk ‘Run To The Top Of The Fell’ as “you listen to your heart and the song of the curlew/Climb higher and higher with the world below you/The birds and the wind and your breath are the only sounds/Your legs are aching but your brain is buzzing/You’re lost in a trance absorbed in the running/You’re on a high reaching for the higher ground”.

Sam Lawrence on mandolin and Belle Kay on backing vocals, with an acoustic solo from Ben, ‘Green Heather’ is a father-son reverie of teenage days and romance on Embsay Moor (“I held you close beside me as clouds went rolling past/Couldn’t think beyond that summer, didn’t know they’d go so fast/You spoke about the future, imagined where we’d be/That moment in the heather was a life enough for me/Don’t say never, never say never again/Forever let me lie in green heather”) tinged with regrets at things lost (“Now my roving days are over and after all these years/To think about that time together brings me close to tears/Perhaps there’s cold comfort in the thought that I might lie/Forever in green heather where the times pass me by”).,

Another duet, Ben on banjo and mandolin and Sam on woodwind, harmonica-coloured waltzer ‘If’ is a simple Wordsworth-shaded song about the love of being among the hills (“If there’s a heaven let it be like this/So content am I with this earthly bliss/My joy is so simple, I love to roam these hills/To wander by myself and do no man no ill … but if there is nothing, just an endless black hole/Please let me remember this day ‘til I’m no more”).

Ben on lead and again playing banjo and mandolin with Sam switching to fiddle, the swirling ‘Michael And The Red Kite’ brings socioeconomic commentary to the table in its parallel images of man and the once endangered bird struggling to survive (“Red kite can’t remember when it found its last meal/Michael knows too well when he last closed a deal”), carrying the message “we all need each other, grower and gatherer/We all need each other, hunter and scavenger” and ending on a note of hope (“There’s got to a be a buyer for his service on the line/Red kite is content; everything will be fine”).

Jon on lead, Phil on bass and carried by plucked banjo, ‘The Path’ fetches up in St Bees as “the sun comes creeping over the felltops” as another trek begins, gradually unfolding as a love song of life’s shared journeys (“we keep walking this path together/Taking it one step at a time/I take your hand on the steep parts/When I tire then you take mine/One day we’ll surely reach the ocean/And cool our feet in the endless sea/Then there’ll be no more walking /Then there will be just you and me”).

Opening with appropriate effects, another avian spreads its wings with the duetted ‘Skylark In The Rain’, Sam on woodwind, again informed with social commentary (“Skylark sings high above/Marks a space to breed/Walking on the ground below/We try to be free”), a seize the moment sentiment (“Let’s enjoy, while we can/Our ordinary lives/Even in the rain”) and a reflection on those moments when you’re not sure what’s the right thing to do or say (“Strangers pass in the rain/Asking how you are/If you give the honest truth/You’ve made a real faux pas/I still don’t know when it’s right/To open up or lie/And why it’s fine to share a laugh/When on our own we cry”).

From feathered friends, Sam on woodwind, Jacqui Ibbotson and bassist Robin Christensen-Marriott on backing, and Tobias Sturmer on drums, things take a four-legged shift with the strident traditional styled Fairportish ballad ‘The Wild Boar Of Bradford’, a retelling of the 14th century legend of a wild boar terrorising Cliffe Woods in Undercliffe and how John O’Gaunt, the Lord of the Manor, throwing down a challenge, John Northrop killed it with his slingshot, removing its tongue to claim his reward, only for another to stumble on the corpse, cut off its head and seek to cheat Northop of his due.

And from porcine to equine with woodwind and Jon on semi-spoken lead for the melodically circling ‘Horses’ Eyes’, another song treating on memory, the album coming to a close with, first, Jon on lead for the philosophical ‘Sense Of Place’, a breezy number with South African township vibes about the meaning of home (“I feel this place it touches me/From the top of my head down to my feet/And with every single step I take/I’ve a sense of belonging, a sense of place”), And finally, Ben on echoey lead and lithophone, Jon on complementary spoken passages, there’s ‘Making Memories On The Pennine Way’, the “heart and spine of Britain” with its childhood recollection of how “You took me on your shoulders/Up over Malhamdale/And the stone flags you laid down/Along the Pennine Way/This long green trail belongs to you and me/And every smiling stranger walking free/We won’t take the easy road, it’s not in our DNA”. It ends with the closing poignancy of “we’ll meet as son and father/In an old café/Remembering the light on the side of the dales…Where the waters flow to the Vale, or the Irish sea/Where I’m walking home, though green, gold and grey/With my face to the north, making new memories on the Pennine Way”. An album with its compass set to the true north of the heart, you should slip on your best boots and join it on its rambling.

Mike Davies

Artists’ website: www.benavison.bandcamp.com/album/songs-of-the-green-trails

‘The Wild Boar Of Bradford’ – live: