from
Newstatesman
BACK TO OUR ROOTS
David Cheale
Lisa Hannigan is one of the innovative artists taking folk music into the 21st century
At some tantalisingly unspecified point later this year, Lisa Hannigan's first solo album, Sea Sew, will finally get a UK release - it came out months ago in Ireland, her home turf. Hannigan, a singer and songwriter best known for her vocals on Damien Rice's two albums 0 and 9, is a bright new voice in popular music. Sea Sew is full of memorable melodies and richly textured arrangements, while her singing ranges from pure girlish sweet*ness to something altogether darker. Her performances alongside Rice, both on record and live, won her a considerable fan base: her husky timbre became more than backing vocals, often taking the lead on Rice's controlled explosions of emotion.
They were a team from the early days of Rice's career, bumping into each other in a bar in Dublin, where Hannigan, who at school had ambitions to become an opera singer, was studying art history at Trinity College. She told Rice she was a singer, so he went to hear her in a classical music competition and hired her for his band. They lasted seven years together, and then one night a couple of years ago they were about to go on stage in Munich when Rice told her abruptly that he would no longer be needing her services. A businesslike announcement was issued saying that their "professional relationship has run its creative course" - and that was that.
Since then, Hannigan has been working on her solo career, and Sea Sew is the result. It's lighter, breezier, more whimsical than her material with Rice, though it does have its melancholy moments. It's an album that has been categorised within the the broad spectrum of music that now goes under the heading of "folk". The instrumentation is almost entirely acoustic - double bass, drums, acoustic guitars, banjo, fiddle, cello, glockenspiel, harmonium - while her voice has a natural, unforced quality.
And yet there's almost nothing here, apart from the lilt of her accent, to suggest that she is an Irish folk singer; though there are fiddles and a banjo, this is a million miles from the boisterous revelry of The Dubliners, let alone The Pogues. Nor do her songs fit in with the folk tradition of narrative songwriting, being more personal meditations on love and relationships, with the sea as a recurring theme.
So what is it about her music that makes it folk? Chiefly its acoustic nature; the sounds you hear are natural, earthy, genuine - crucial qualities in the world of folk, which values authenticity over artifice. The guitar, the banjo, the strings and the harmonium mesh together in a way that's not folksy, but certainly folky. This hand-crafted flavour extends to the sleeve art, which was knitted and sewn by Hannigan herself. And amid the self-penned tunes, there's a version of "Courting Blues", a song written by the veteran Scottish folkie Bert Jansch, as if to say: this is where I'm coming from.
As a folk singer, Hannigan is in good company, because this year folk music is a big sound. This month's BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, presented by Mike Harding, a veteran of folk's Seventies boom time, will reward artists singing and playing in a dizzying spectrum of styles. At one end, trad-folk stalwart Chris Wood is nominated for his album Trespasser, on which, as well as lamenting the enclosures of common land and the ruin they caused to agricultural communities, he sings of modern-day rural blights such as 4x4s in the lanes of Gloucestershire. At the other end is Jim Moray, nominated for his Low Culture album, which sees him moving on from the electronic sound of his laptop-folk to a more African-influenced style.
Also among the nominees are Eliza Carthy, daughter of old folkies Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson; Carthy, with her bleached-blonde hair and prominent piercings, cuts a distinctive figure in the folk scene, and is nominated for her Dreams of Breathing Underwater album. Meanwhile, the buff and hunky Seth Lakeman, who has helped bring folk music into the mainstream and even on to daytime television, is nominated for the best live act award.
Elsewhere, the thriving Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow (which ends 1 February), celebrates music from all shades of the folk-roots spectrum; among the star attractions are Kate Rusby, a key figure in the folk revival, and Rachel Unthank and the Winterset, one of last year's big breakthrough folk acts. Based around two sisters from the north-east of England, Rachel and Becky Unthank, they play a beguiling and often creepy (lots of their songs seem to be about dead babies) mixture of traditional tunes, self-penned songs and striking cover versions. They were nominated last year for the Mercury Prize, and in many ways epitomise the contemporary approach to folk, with their sparse, spacious, eerie arrangements and heavily accented voices.
Today's folk scene, then, is a vibrant, shifting thing in which tradition is respected but inno*vation is also admired. The re-emergence of folk perhaps ties in with the boom in live music: people are hungry for real musical experiences, and folk, with its emphasis on authenticity, is about as real as it gets.
Such is the proliferation of folk sub-genres that folk is beginning to look like the world of high finance, with its countless derivatives: among the niche scenes are nu-folk, folktronica, neo-folk, folk noir, and freak folk - the latter a mostly North American offshoot practised by neo-hippies such as Devendra Banhart and Sufjan Stevens. In Germany, there's even a folk-metal scene.
Lisa Hannigan's style is perhaps best described as "indie folk", and this was borne out by a show I saw her performing at the end of last year at St John's Church in Smith Square, London. The crowd was youngish, metropolitan, well- dressed, the music was strikingly original, and Hannigan, in a sparkly blue dress, sang to us in her wide-ranging voice. Warm, dark, rich and full of unexpected twists and turns: this was folk music for the 21st century.
"Sea Sew" is available from Lisa Hannigan's website:
http://www.lisahannigan.ie