Funded by Arts Council England and produced by Chris Pepper, Wall’s second album is a homage to her adopted Black Country home and a celebration of its people and places. Wall on piano, she’s accompanied by Gustaf Ljunggren on bass clarinet, clarinet and flute and go to double bassist John Parker with Pepper providing marxophone, mellotron and Casio.
Her often ethereal voice possessed of a Welsh tinged purity akin to Laura Marling, she opens with the title track, a paean to the night skies and a nod to the region’s industrial heritage (“as the black becomes red becomes spark/Breath into life as the stars ahead light up the dark/ Watching and waiting and anticipating the glow/Patiently listening, fires are flickering low…the sky will surrender the day/Burning inside for the world to remember your name”) that flows into ‘A Black Country Psalm’, a poem spoken by its author Martin Kennedy Yates about resilience in the face of adversity (“Though we are burnt-out, bruised, broken, let this sweet, healing truth be spoken: there is faith, there is hope, there is love; these remain; these remain”).
Again speaking of its industrial glory, specifically the glass industry (also celebrated by Dan Whitehouse’s Voices From The Cones) and the canals that connected factories and communities, the early Joni-like ‘Glasshouse Bridge’ (situated in Wordsley over the Stourbridge Canals) was inspired by a Liz Berry poem and Tom Hicks photo of the same name and blossomed into a story of love and loss (“I sat a while and I thought of you/And the Turner painting I still see/Was a treasure lost with you and me/And the surface broke and you slipped away/Now I say your name everyday… So I stare into the burnished gold/Knowing you’re not there for me to hold onto”).
Opening with drone and featuring woodwinds and mandolin, the dreamily swaying ‘Last Meadow’ takes her to Windmill Hill in Amblecote, near Stourbridge, and walking through Corbett Meadow (“Feel the earth beneath my feet/Ancient turf, so dark and sweet/Hawthorns Jewel hiding there/Dandelions laced through my hair”), one of the last remaining green spaces in the area and a wildlife haven for ancient trees, badgers, bats, and numerous bird species, humbled by the vastness of nature (“Feeling slightly small among the stars/Feeling ever small below the stars”). It is, guessingly, sung in the persona of John Corbett, the businessman who, in 1892 gifted it to the locals who, along with his descendants, have successfully fought off a proposal by Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust to redevelop it as a housing estate and plan to create a well-being centre.
Accompanied by double bass and with Pepper on lap steel, the puttering ‘Home Child’ recalls a darker element of the region’s history as, between 1873 and 1933, more than 5,000 immigrant children from the Children’s Emigration Homes of Birmingham were resettled in rural communities in Ontario and the Maritime provinces of Canada. One such was Eliza Showell, the great aunt of Black Country poet Berry, who in 1908, aged twelve and newly orphaned, was sent to work in indentured service in rural Nova Scotia, never to return home or see her brothers again, as, in her voice, Wall poignantly sings “I’ve been sending you my letters/But there’s nothing in return/This must be how it feels to be alone/Brother of mine/Will I see you more last time?”.
Again with woodwind and lap steel, Pepper adding dulcitone, the slightly jazz-shaded, vocally double-tracked ‘Trick Of The Light’ returns to the glassmaking heritage, in particular the Chance Brothers, one of the world’s leading innovative pioneers, their glass being made in Smethwick and, among other things, used for lighthouse optics (“I’ve watched you before run aground/So follow my gaze, I’ll keep you safe and sound/These troublesome waters will pass/I’ll show you the way with my heart of glass”), many of which still exist.
Marking the album’s midpoint, the title track is reprised as a brief instrumental featuring just Wall on piano and Ljunggren’s woodwinds, before things continue with the lively, soaring ‘Dereliction’, inspired by Berry and Hicks’s book of the almost same name and with Wall’s strummed guitar leaning into the DADGAD guitar tuning used by Led Zeppelin, the track featuring Indian harmonium and Aaron Catlow on fiddle as, rather than the word’s usual definition of things falling apart through abandonment or negligence, evokes abandonment in the musical and lyrical giddy sense of being set free like a “wayward kite” (“You leave me reckless/I throw caution to the breeze/Our love is breathless/We are both stormy seas/I choose to be forsaken/Wildness filling every cell”).
Slowing the pace down, ‘Blue’ returns to Glasshouse Bridge and the way the canal cuts a ribbon of blue through the grey, the skies and sun mirrored on the water, Pepper on tinkling glockenspiel as, Wall on vocals and dulcitone, it enfolds Claire Tedstone reading her titular poem.
A lilting lullaby that harks back to the 30s and 40s, ‘Cost, Warm And Lovely’ comes from a phrase her Black Country husband’s mother would say as she snuggled him into bed at night. As such, the track captures exactly that feeling like a musical hug. Again featuring just Wall (on guitar) and Ljunggren, ‘Leaving’, inspired by Berry’s Republic of Motherhood, also touches on the bittersweet nature of parenting (Wall has two teenage daughters) in the way you eventually have to let go the apron strings (“she’s all grown up and on her way/I know it now, she cannot stay/So I’ll find a space within my heart/To store the love while we’re apart/And I’ll keep it safe until that time/But I guess you’re leaving me behind”).
After opening with dark skies, it ends opening the curtain to ‘Let The Light In’ which, Wall on sparse piano, Black Country singer-songwriter Matt Sayers on backing vocals, Catlow on aching Celtic fiddle and Pepper on Indian harmonium, is a tribute to Bert Bissell MBE who, born in Dudley, first climbed Ben Nevis on VJ Day in 1954 and proceeded to do so a further 106 times up the age of 91, making it his mission to oversee the building of a peace cairn, now officially the highest war memorial in Britain. The sentiments are beautifully expressed as Wall sings “Climb, always climb/To remember those who fell/And to tell their tale… look for joy/In every song/Time after time/To be grateful for the life that we live today …Let the light in and fill your soul with love”.
These Black Lights illuminate Wall as a Black Country aurora borealis.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.susywallmusic.co.uk
‘Dereliction’:
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