Tag: Graham Coe

Their fourth album and the first not to have a Suffolk term as its title, nonetheless Lucy (double bass, bouzouki, guitar, glockenspiel) and Jon (double bass, bouzouki, electric guitar) Hart maintain their local connections with heavily traditional flavoured songs that draw on Suffolk myth, legend and history and are once more joined by Toby Shaer on flutes, whistles and fiddle, accordionist Archie Churchill-Moss, percussionist Evan Carson and Graham Coe on cello.

Opening with and punctuated by dancing flute, one of several songs with images of water, ‘Close To The Edge’ is based on the 12th-century Suffolk legend of the Merman (depicted along with other figures on the cover artwork by Lucy) or The Green Man Of Orford, a naked, scaly sea creature captured in fishing nets and held captive in Orford Castle, bearing a theme of curiosity to discover a world unknown (“I see faces through fractals of light/It pulls me”).

The gently fingerpicked swaying ‘Place Like My Own’ continues that marine thread but shifts counties to Essex for a song about the fishermen of Brightlingsea who, “mouths to feed”, set out on what was intended to be a three month voyage (“As we see our loved ones fade, on the horizon, this catch will be ours to take/cross our palms with silver”) but didn’t return for nine, the song speaking of the yearning for home (“At night I dream of my pillow, in my own bed”) and wondering if those they left behind have given them up for lost.

Featuring bodhran and bowed strings, the percussive driving ‘Break From The Chain’, Jon’s vocals upfront, turns to ancient history and is inspired by how, in 1907, two boys from Rendham discovered the life-size bronze head of the Roman Emperor Claudius buried in the banks of the River Alde, reputedly hacked off his statue in Colchester by the Iceni forces of Queen Boudicca during her AD61 rebellion and taken as a trophy.

If there’s been times when you’ve felt disassociated from your life then the wistful slow swayer ‘Where Do You Go?’ will strike a chord.  (“What is up? What is down?/Will you ever understand what you are feeling”). Changing tack, Lucy on lead, the bouzouki-driven five-minute ‘What’s Left For Wishing?’ was borne from their first-hand witnessing of the Arora Borealis, or Northern Lights, the subtext being about the meaningfulness of a shared experience (“all the colours, they won’t mean as much if you’re not next to me”).

With a double bass pulse and eerie ambience, the title ‘Cruel Mistress’ might suggest some traditional ballad (and there’s a definite Pentangle flavour) about a mean-hearted lover but is in fact a song about the sea highlighting the increasing rate of erosion of the Suffolk coast, many residents having to dismantle their homes before they fell into the sea. Again, however, it carries deeper meaning in the pian that comes with having to pick your life apart with only memories left to cling to.

‘Rush In’ is of a more uptempo nature and, born from sitting on the beach contemplating a pebble’s origins, is an existential analogy about how you sometimes have to let something special go before you’ve fully had the chance to know it and, taking a wild guess, could well be linked to their becoming parents.

A circling acoustic guitar pattern introduces ‘Company’, Shaer’s violin going on to bolster the uneasy mood of a song that addresses how social media increasingly becomes a substitute for real communication and inculcates a culture of loneliness, but, on the other hand, proved a lifeline during lockdown (“we’re all on our knees/Loneliness has company”).

Jon on lead with diatonic accordion making its presence felt, things have a very personal resonance in the urgent ‘The Air That We Breathe’, which tells how, since the birth of their daughter they have been planting young oaks around the Suffolk lanes a legacy for future generations (“fresh morning air is the future we leave”) but also providing an arboreal mother shelter for the local fauna.

The optimism and sense of caring carries over into the buoyant ‘Everything Will Be OK’, about wishing you could have been there to help (“I would have wiped your tears lightly from off your face”) but providing reassurance (“The sun will shine again”) for someone in troubled times, melodeon, bouzouki and percussion bearing Lucy’s vocals aloft,

It ends with another five-minute number, the cello-stained ‘Be Still’, a song steeped in loss (“all the minutes, months and years you’ll never get to fill”) that seeks look for calm in the storms of grief (or perhaps depression) and accept what cannot be changed and reach for hope ahead rather than drown in the pain behind.

An album of hope, home, hearts and hugs, this is a high tide indeed.

Mike Davies

Artists’ website: www.honeyandthebear.co.uk

‘Close To The Edge’ – official video: