John Foxx – The Complete Cathedral Oceans (Demon / Metamatic album, 2016)

John Foxx’s Metamatic imprint, in conjunction with Demon, will issue the three volumes of the Ultravox! founder’s Cathedral Oceans opus as a deluxe limited vinyl set on September 30. I wrote a short piece about The Complete Cathedral Oceans for This Is Not Retro. Read it here.

(c) 2016 Mat Smith for This Is Not Retro

Kim Gordon – Murdered Out (Matador single, 2016)

‘Murdered Out’ is a new collaboration by former Sonic Youth bassist / guitarist Kim Gordon and producer Justin Raisen, featuring Stella Mozgawa from Warpaint on drums.

The track was inspired by Gordon’s move to LA and her observation that so many cars were being resprayed to a black matte finish, a rejection of expected norms and an anti-corporate, anti-establishment, undeniably alternative approach to life. Like that attitude, ‘Murdered Out’ is anything but conventional; everything here is fuzzy, messy and utterly non-linear. Distortion is used with heavyhanded abandon, leaving this track with the same black matte finish that Gordon was originally inspired by. There’s no doubt that the style of the track was entirely conscious and not as loose as it perhaps sounds, but nevertheless Raisen and Gordon give ‘Murdered Out’ a messy, detached quality that’s refreshingly ugly.

‘Murdered Out’ is available on iTunes.

(c) 2016 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Goldfrapp – Twist / Train slipcases (Mute, 2003)

dsc_0539dsc_0541

Issued by Mute in 2003 to house the various formats of the ‘Twist’ and ‘Train’ singles by Goldfrapp. I’m selling both of these. They can be found on eBay here and here.

(c) 2016 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Art Brut – Pump Up The Volume (Mute / EMI single, 2007)


emi / labels / mute records (marketing) | dl | 11/02/2008

Is it so wrong, to break from your kiss to turn up a pop song?‘ is the ethical question posed by Art Brut‘s Eddie Argos on the third single to be taken from the band’s 2007 album, It’s A Bit Complicated. The song is an emotional, tender song that manages to merge youthful sexual experiences with a passion for records that seems to eclipse the singer’s interest in the former. Hence the question about whether it’s fine to be as focussed on the music coming from a radio as it is on the, ahem, job at hand. Throughout, Argos manages to paint a vivid image of teenage bedroom awkwardness while big, punked-up clanging guitar riffs and soulful harmonies dominate. The more I listen to Argos’s semi-spoken, semi-sung delivery, with all his clever double meanings and casual observations, the more I think of him as a poet rather than an accomplished indie band’s frontman. The answer to the question, by the way, seems to be a very firm ‘no’, judging by the reaction of the girl in the song.

Released as a single track download the year after the album was put out by Mute as part of EMI / Labels, like all of their material from this period it is no longer available on iTunes. Whether that’s anything to do with the band apparently not knowing it was even being put out is anyone’s guess. This is what Argos posted to the band’s website at the time: “It seems Art Brut have accidentally released a single. Yes, the rumours are true. But how could this happen, you may ask? Why were we not informed? Well, my friends, pick up any thread of incompetence and it will usually lead you to a record company. That’s right, it seems EMI have decided to release ‘Pump Up the Volume’ without informing either the band or myself, making any kind of widescale promotion rather difficult.”

Thanks to Z for help with the preparation for this review.

First posted 2012; re-posted 2016.

(c) 2016 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Art Brut – Direct Hit (EMI / Mute single, 2007)


emi / labels / mute records (marketing) | 7″/cd/dl | 18/06/2007

‘Direct Hit’ was the second single to be taken from Art Brut‘s album It’s A Bit Complicated which was released and marketed by Mute as part of the Labels arrangement with their then-parent EMI. Packaged in a sleeve that evokes school maths lessons (designed by the band and Mute’s art director Paul A. Taylor), ‘Direct Hit’ was released as a 7″ and two-track CD; a digital release was probably also put out, but sadly has been removed from iTunes.

‘Direct Hit’ finds the band in feisty mood, spitting out faintly over-the-top AC/DC heavy guitar riffs that have no logical place on an indie record; Beach Boys wordless vocal harmonies blend in with frontman Eddie Argos‘s finest Colin Newman deadpan (‘here comes the really good bit,’ he says at one point, just like something straight off Wire‘s ‘Map Ref. 41N 93W’). There are also some rattling guitar interjections that wouldn’t go amiss on a mid-period Sonic Youth track, shouty chorus vocals, what sounds like a theremin, lots of instructions to get on the dance floor and move, and even some descriptions of social awkwardness. For a three minute song, that makes for a pretty busy little track and its relativel non-conformity gave some encouragement back in 2007 that perhaps the spirit of punk hadn’t been lost for good after all.

Across the CD and 7″ are two B-sides. ‘Dont Blame It On The Trains’ is an ode to staying in the house under a duvet, general laziness and snoozing the whole day away. ‘What am I doing this weekend? Avoiding phonecalls from all my friends,’ runs one of the best couplets on a track that has a musical palette that feels like Blur attempting a cover of The Velvets’ ‘Sister Ray’ in a ‘Parklife’ stylee. The It’s A Bit Complicated album includes a track called ‘Blame It On The Trains’ which is nothing like this. Over on the 7″, the fantastically-titled ‘I Want To Be Double A-Sided’ is an emotional paean to love and insecurity over a rough, garagey groove. Argos’s vocals were apparently recorded on a the tour bus by Mikey Breyer in a car park, all of which gives this the feel of a pencil sketch, and it’s all the more lovely as a result.

First published 2012; edited 2016.

(c) 2016 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Art Brut – Nag Nag Nag Nag (EMI / Mute single, 2006)


emi / labels / mute records (marketing) | 7″/cd

By rights, this isn’t actually a ‘Mute‘ record at all – it’s one of those EMI releases that Mute marketed, and so it doesn’t carry a Mute catalogue number. It formed part of EMI’s valuing of Mute as a vehicle for representing music from the indie underground, and it said much – to me – about the future direction of my favourite label at that time. It’s hard to listen to this rather angular slice of spiky guitar pop and find any other reference point within the Mute roster of years gone by with which to compare this, apart from maybe 13th Hour band Foil if you squint hard enough.

The Mute website proudly claimed that this single had one more ‘Nag’ than Cabaret Voltaire, which of course is totally true, but it seems like a pointless point of reference since Art Brut are the complete antithesis of the Cabs’ industrial ethic. But, criticisms aside, ‘Nag Nag Nag Nag’ is a brilliant example of why 2006/7 was a really exciting period for UK music. Art Brut specialised in acerbic, near-spoken word vocals from lead ‘singer’ Eddie Argos, dark guitar melodies and furious drumming. ‘Nag Nag Nag Nag’, whilst in its own way uplifting, is intense and relentlessly negative – ‘a record collection reduced to a mixtape‘ is just about the most dispirited thing I’d heard in a song since Joy Division, while also anchoring this into a distrust of the iTunes era.

B-side ‘I Found This Song In The Road’ continues the theme, finding Argos tapping thoughts into his phone and leaving ‘eighty messages saved and unsent‘; the ultimate act of digital cowardice perhaps, but cathartic nonetheless. Something in the delivery reminds me not just of Foil, but of Wire‘s Colin Newman, but there’s no denying that Art Brut were ploughing their own furrow back then and it was an exciting thing to hear.

First published 2006; edited 2016.

(c) 2016 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Fiona Brice – Paris (Olivia Louvel Multiplié Mix) (Bella Union single, 2016)


Olivia Louvel – founder of Cat Werk Imprint and frequent collaborator with Paul ‘PK’ Kendall – has remixed ‘Paris’ from Fiona Brice’s Postcards From album. Brice is a violinist and composer who has worked with many pop acts, as well as having a core role in Placebo.

Louvel’s approach is to take Brice’s beautiful violin and piano passages and leave them relatively untouched, pure even, but add beds of sound and tiny, popping beats and other sonic interventions to create a delicate, subtly soundworld. The mix recalls the fragility of Delia Gonzalez’s recent album while also having a textural depth that’s a lot like listening in 3D.

The mix is taken from Postcards Reframed, which is available on iTunes.

(c) 2016 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

onDeadWaves – Dusk Sessions #1 (Mute single, 2016)


The debut album from onDeadWavesPolly Scattergood and James Chapman / Maps – has been one of the major highlights of this year, a very special record that is definitely more than the sum of its parts – a major compliment since those ‘parts’ represent two very accomplished musicians in their own right, presiding over back catalogues full of towering emotional moments.

For Dusk Sessions #1, onDeadWaves offer up a new version of ‘California’, one of the few truly upbeat songs (albeit one about death) on the album. Here, everything is reduced to a whisper, giving the track an intimate edge that feels like little more than wind rustling through fallen leaves, or a quiet nighttime acoustic beach singalong for depressed Millennials.

The track is backed by an equally fragile cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’, whose ethereality makes the version of ‘California’ seem weighty in comparison. Here the pair give a curious optimistic edge to a song that is essentially about having no emotional or capacity for feeling at all.

Dusk Sessions #1 is available on iTunes.

(c) 2016 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Vince Clarke’s Very Records announce Reed & Caroline ‘Buchla & Singing’ album

VERY RECORDS are pleased to announce details of the debut album by Reed & Caroline, Buchla & Singing, which will be released on October 14th. The album will be the second release on Vince Clarke’s Very Records label.

Buchla & Singing is just that – vocals and nothing but a vintage synth. The album was conceived by New York electronic musician Reed Hays using only a Buchla modular system, interwoven with the pure, angelic vocals of Caroline Schutz from the bands Folksongs For The Afterlife and The Inner Banks. With songs celebrating the humble electron and the equally underappreciated washing machine, Buchla & Singing takes in shimmering, spacey synth pop, tales of roadtrips, quirky bedtime stories, and pieces grounded in austere classical minimalism.

Reed Hays met Caroline Schutz while they were studying at Oberlin College. Hays, a cellist, had arrived at the school under false pretences, switching to their new electronic music programme just to be able to get his hands on the college’s Buchla synthesizer. Art major Schutz only discovered that she wanted to be a singer after graduating and schlepping round the States as a graphic designer for the touring Lollapalooza festival, before realising that she could sing better than some of the bands she was supporting.

Their first album together sees the pair delivering tracks like ‘Singularity (We Bond)’ and ‘Electrons’, whose electronic structures and lyrics fizz with scientific discovery. “I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, which is where they put German rocket scientists after World War II to work on the space programme,” Hays explains. “When I was growing up there in the 1970s and 80s, there was nothing there but scientists and engineers. Space and science were just what I grew up with, so they’re natural things for me to write about. I like those early OMD songs that sounded like love songs but were actually about science. Our stuff is pretty obviously just about washing machines and electrons!”

The third member of this duo is Hays’s Buchla. Best known as the go-to synth for producing crazy R2-D2 sounds, Hays has managed to coerce his system into producing a broad array of unorthodox styles here: whether classic analogue electro pop on ‘John And Rene’, rippling randomised arpeggios that nod to classical music, or the crystalline sounds of glassware being washed on ‘Henry The Worm’, a cute story that could have been conjured from the warped imagination of Lewis Carroll or Eric Carle that follows the adventures of a worm as it crawls around a restaurant. Buchla & Singing is the sound of a tricky synth being put through its paces in ways that its creator never envisaged. 

Buchla & Singing will be released as a digital download and as a CD available from www.veryrecords.com on October 14.

Reed Hays on the Buchla

Most people pronounce it wrong. It’s pronounced Boo-cla. It’s a Dutch name.

Don Buchla was out in Berkeley, California in the sixties, designing synthesizers at the same time that Bob Moog was over on the East Coast, but they never spoke to one another. Buchla worked for NASA in the sixties and he developed technology for fuel sensors on rocket tanks. He put those on the synth he developed. They respond to how your fingers touch them. There’s no keyboard, just these touch pads. For me, being a string player, it’s something I can really relate to, but it’s a really difficult piece of kit to use. Nothing’s labelled like any other synthesizer. Making this album just with that synth was a real challenge.

Buchla came from a crazy background. Some of the first modules he designed were for Ken Kesey’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Those were all red modules. The rumour was that if you licked the red module you’d get high. I have some of those original modules. Did I lick it? I don’t know what you’re talking about.

On this album, I set up a lot of arpeggios, dialling them up on little sliders and having them addressed randomly. I was letting the Buchla do the work for me in writing some of those arpeggios and chords. It really is like having another collaborator.

Even though I’d set myself the challenge of making the album on the Buchla, I wanted to cheat. I wanted to use a Moog for the bass, which is what you’re supposed to do, but actually in the end I got a great bass sound on the Buchla. ‘Washing Machine’ has a Sennheiser vocoder, but the vocoding on all the other songs is done on the Buchla, so in the end I didn’t cheat really.

Vince Clarke on the Buchla

I had one once but I sold it. It’s way too difficult to use.

Press release (c) 2016 Mat Smith for Very Records

Pepys Show: An Interview With Benjamin Till

Shortly after midnight, 350 years ago to this very day, in the City of London bakery of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane, a fire began. London was no stranger to fires, but this particular one would proceed largely unchecked, destroying an area of the City that far exceeded the damage wrought by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz.

We owe much of our understanding of what took place over the two and a half days of fierce burning that became known as the Great Fire to one man, an upper middle class Cambridge graduate and member of parliament called Samuel Pepys. Pepys is synonymous with the diary that he kept for some nine and a half years, beginning on 1st January 1660 until he ceased writing nearly a decade later after fearing – unfoundedly – that his eyesight was failing him. His writings represented a concise, unadorned form of reportage that gives us powerful insight into a period of massive upheaval in Britain’s capital – the Restoration of the monarchy, the Great Fire, the Great Plague, the Second Dutch War – all of which had a major bearing on the topography and conceptual fabric of London as we know it today.

Pepys’s obsessive documenting of his own affairs (more on that later) and the events unfolding around him in London is paralleled by the work of composer Benjamin Till, whose extreme meticulousness can be heard on his new album, The Pepys Motet. A choral work for twenty singers, Till’s work is an intense, immersive aural soundscape where the listener is literally surrounded by sung passages taken from Pepys’s diaries, executed in collaboration with Paul ‘PK’ Kendall, a producer and engineer for whom soundscaping of this nature is just as fastidious as either Pepys’s writing or Till’s approach to composing.

Till will be familiar to Erasure fans for his Channel 4 work Our Gay Wedding, which featured a stand-out performance from Andy Bell, and which featured Till as one the grooms. His Pepys project began in 2009, when he was asked to conceive a Pepys tribute to commemorate the anniversary of Pepys putting pen to paper by St Olave’s Church in the City, where Pepys and his wife Elizabeth are buried.

“I’d never really thought about Pepys before,” admits Till. “Obviously everyone knows Pepys and the Great Fire and the Plague, but for me that was about all I could think of.” His obsessive approach to pretty much everything he does forced him to invest himself fully in the Diaries, reading short and long versions fervently, in the process consuming around a million of Pepys’s words.

The work he began on 1st January 2010 was inspired by both Pepys and the massive choral work Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis, which Tallis had written as a forty-part motet, a polyphonic choral work typically sung in churches. “I wrote for eight choirs of five individuals, each of whom represented a different aspect of Pepys’s life, and each of them also represented a different choral tradition,” explains Till of his approach to composing The Pepys Motet. “I had a choir of five gospel singers who represented Pepys’s home life; I had a choir of five opera singers to represent his social climbing, five folk singers representing anything he wrote about what was going on in London itself; there was a choir of musical theatre singers who represented his debauchery and his love of theatre. There was a choir of early music singers who represented anything to do with religion or royalty, and then there was a choir of five children to represent the children he never had, a choir of five men from the Royal Navy to represent Pepys’s job as Chief Secretary to the Admiralty. Finally there were five singers from Magdalene College Cambridge, where Pepys studied.”

Till wrote solidly for eight months on the original version of The Pepys Motet. “It was a proper labour of love,” he recalls. “I really enjoyed the process of trying to write forty unique lines with no repetition whatsoever, with no-one doubling anyone. Obviously they don’t all sing at once, but sometimes forty singers sing forty different lines, and that was quite exciting. I made sure it happened once in every movement.”

Till scribed a daily blog from the day he started – the 350th anniversary of when Pepys put pen to paper for the first entry in his Diaries – and which continues to this day. The blog, the modern form of a diary in many ways, captured Till’s fundraising efforts to finance the Motet, progress on the forty-part work, the genesis of other projects, and, for the first two years, a précis of what Pepys had been doing on that very day some three and a half centuries prior.

Three movements from the forty-part motet were performed at St Olave’s at the end of 2010. “It was quite an extraordinary experience,” says Till. “The choir sang in a circle around the audience and moved around a lot.”Till had five of the six movements he had composed recorded at that time, but felt that the scramble to complete the work had left him with recordings that weren’t up to the exacting standards that he’d set himself. He then began a painstaking process of scaling back The Pepys Motet into the form displayed on the new album.

“There was an unfinished business aspect about it all,” sighs Till. “Since the original recordings, I’d set up a choir called The Rebel Chorus, and we recorded another of my compositions called The London Requiem, which was created from gravestone inscriptions from across London, and which PK also produced. There were twenty singers in The Rebel Chorus for that album, which made me realise that it made sense to downscale the Pepys project.”

Taking the piece down from a forty-part work to a twenty-part composition required Till to spend around six months of 2012 hacking it down to size. “I was looking at what didn’t work quite so well with the forty part version, and tried to thin it out,” he explains. “Fortunately, with The Rebel Chorus, a lot of the members of that choir came from that original group used for the forty-part motet, so I kept that sense of there being gospel singers, opera singers, musical theatre singers, folk singers, soul singers and so on. I was writing for the specific individual known voices, for their strengths and their ranges.”

The Rebel Chorus

Recording sessions for the album began in 2013, and Till consciously decided to record the choir in groups of five, with each of the singers in a different booth, something that’s relatively unprecedented in classical music. “I wanted the flexibility of being able to do whatever I wanted to the vocal stems,” he explains, earnestly. “Also, when you’re writing for twenty voices it can be a cacophony of sound if you can’t control or differentiate the individuals. One of the things I love about The Pepys Motet is that suddenly you’ll get this gospel singer or a soul singer or an opera singer will kind of come out of the mix. Recording the singers individually allowed us to separate the sound and then PK could put reverb on one singer if he chose to, or completely take the reverb out, or give an effect of everyone going around in a circle around the ears.”

Till’s approach might sound like overdriven controlfreakery, but the album benefits from that exacting approach to using the voices as a sonic tapestry. Words whirl around the stereo field, whispers have complete clarity and the whole thing has a controlled denseness more akin to a soundscape or musique concrète composition.

“It starts with the first words Pepys wrote in his diary with each singer in turn singing a syllable each –’Ble-ssed be God‘ – and it sort of zooms in on itself, and then the next group start, and it becomes like a spiral,” he continues. “I recorded everything with very close mics, so it meant that we could ask the singers to whisper, or sing really, really quietly. The whole piece was written for a lot of vocal gymnastics, and extended vocal techniques. There are a lot of growls and snarls and harmonics and things like that, which, if you’re close mic’ing somebody singing overtones, you get the whistles and the really interesting things that you’d otherwise lose.”

The approach that Till and PK took of allowing voices to interact, counteract, spin and overlap was inspired by the jump-cut style of Pepys’s writing. “He changes tack so often in his diary,” Till laughs. “He’ll be talking about the Great Plague and then he’ll say that ‘I’m really pleased to say that I’m now worth a thousand pounds!‘ You were literally just talking about death and now you’re talking about this! And then you’re talking about wanting to shag some woman and then you’re talking about how you hate yourself for going to the the theatre! It just keeps moving. It’s because he wasn’t writing for anyone’s consumption, he was just writing his thoughts. It’s very mercurial. Because he was writing his inner thoughts, he writes them in a very direct language. There’s none of the florid stuff that you find in his letters and his official documents. The letters were almost unreadable because he was so florid, as was the style in those days, but the stuff in his Diaries is just unbelievably direct.”

The most direct writing was reserved for writing about his sexual conquests and extra-marital affairs which, to prevent his long-suffering wife Elizabeth from detecting his illicit activities, would tend to be written in Latin, French or Spanish. “My favourite line in the whole thing is ‘And endeed I was with my hand in her cunny.’ Even after 350 years that’s still shocking and quite amazing. And that’s why the fifth movement in The Pepys Motet, about his affair with his maid Deb Willett, is jazzy and sleazy, because that felt like the right style to be writing in.”

Till reflects for a moment, gathering his thoughts and sipping from a mug bearing the legend ‘Big Fella’. “There’s this weird thing where there’s so much freedom” he muses. “When you decide you’re going to go up to the bell and ring it, I think you might as well just go for it. That’s why there’s gospel bits in it, and all sorts of other things. This is what London is today, a collection of all of these different groups of people, and that’s also what London was back then. That’s why it was such a pleasure to feature all those different voices.”

Getting that diversity of voices, and the detailed approach to isolating and mixing each voice individually, as well as part of a broader piece, wasn’t without its challenges. For a start, the process would see Till and PK rack up something like 300 hours of mixing – a critical step that was required to execute Till’s vision for the pieces, but one that was unprecedented and exhausting for the pair.

“We also made a decision to use Melodyne on every single voice,” Till continues. “That way we could have the absolute precision of tuning but we didn’t smooth anything. That took an extraordinary amount of time but I almost wanted to treat the voices like a synthesizer, and I wanted the voices to have that extraordinary precision. If hadn’t have done that, we wouldn’t have been able to have the control, and it would have been a less sonically precise experience. I’m really quite anti any sort of tuning software, because I think they can ruin the inherent beauty of a voice. I had massive issues with it to begin with and I started to wonder if it wasn’t real music because of what we were doing to it, but it was only being done so that we could get that precision.”

PK, who has worked on numerous pieces with Till over the last few years, represents the perfect collaborator for someone looking for so much control over the sound. Across his production career, Kendall has consistently looked to fully involve himself in the fabric of sound waves, operating from an immersive position that’s more elemental than compositional.

“Sometimes he would kick me out of the studio,” laughs Till. “He’d turn to me and say ‘Ben, I’m going in, can you go home?’ and he’d put his headphones on and just enter the music. Those were the most amazing times because he’d send me something the next day that he’d done and there’d be these clouds of sound, or he’d have chosen one voice which just cut through the rest. You can trust PK to go away and just do his thing, and if you trust PK you get the best results. I don’t care what he does; whatever he does is going to be better than I could imagine it.”

Investing himself in a project, to the kind of levels that seem almost fanatically purist, is just what Till does. For London Requiem, he would break into Highgate Cemetery at midnight to capture environmental sounds that could then be used within his composition. For Oranges & Lemons, which rounds out the Pepys Motet album, Till once again took a hugely detailed approach to tackling a song familiar to many generations of school children. For this project, Till and a soundman trawled the churches of the City to capture the sound of every single bell referenced in the song, as well as uncovering lost verses that amplified some of the darker sections of the lyrics.

“There’s something exciting about place and an aspect of documentary,” he explains, “but with Oranges & Lemons, there was an almost autistic fanaticism about making sure that every single bell in every single church wasn’t just recorded but was featured in the recording, including little handbells. For the bells of St Helen’s Bishopsgate for example, the church there doesn’t use bells as part of the worship, so those bells are still hanging but without any clapper mechanisms. We climbed up into the belfry and we hit them with a rubber mallet, just to make sure we got them.”

If recording the bells presented logistical challenges – including putting feet through floorboards, getting covered in decades’ worth of black dust and generally getting spooked by weird, spectral noises being picked up on the recordings – it was just as bad trying to process and analyse the recordings. “A bell is so complex in terms of the different harmonics,” Till groans. “What the bell is meant to be ringing is often not what it is actually ringing.”

Ringing the bell at St Catherine Cree, before it was melted down

Stitching together all of the bell recordings in order took five agonising days in total. “For the first day I was thinking it sounded like shit because it was so freakishly out of tune,” Till laughs. “Sometimes you’d have a minor chord where you wanted a major chord, so it would all just sound horrid. And then at a certain point I just went ‘Fuck it – I really like this’. That was the epiphany of Oranges & Lemons, but it nearly killed us. I worked with Julian Simmonds who works at DIN Studios and he used to get these migraines on a daily basis about 4pm because I’d be saying ‘First hemidemisemiquaver, St Helens E. Second hemidemisemiquaver, St Botolph G’, and so we’d be putting them into this file one by one, place by place. I think that almost drove him mad.”

True to his intense reading of Pepys, Till avidly researched the forgotten elements of Oranges & Lemons that throw a much darker hue on the playground song. “We found this extra bit of text, which is the middle section where it goes ‘All ye that in the condemned hole do lie, prepare ye, for tomorrow ye shall die,‘ and it was a poem from the bellman from St Sepulchre, next to Newgate Prison. He would walk around the jail on the night before an execution reading this poem and ringing a bell. They were executed at the strike of nine from the bells, and the bell that you can hear ringing all the way through that sequence is the actual bell that they were listening to. That was literally the last thing they heard, that very bell. And then going into the Tower Of London, which is considered to be the location of the Bells of St John’s. The line ‘Pokers and tongs say the bells of St John’s‘ was about torture in the Tower of London.”

There is a bell whose ringing connects directly back to Pepys’s Diary, which also hangs at the Tower of London. The Curfew Bell would have been rung during the Great Plague to ensure that citizens of the City headed indoors, so as to allow the sick to take to the streets, ghoul-like, in order to get what little fresh air might have availed itself upon them. “It’s got this pulley mechanism which makes a really strange squeak,” recalls Till with what could be a pained wince. “There’s one moment in my Oranges & Lemons where you hear that spiralling right round the ears in that middle section, which is pretty creepy.”

Ringing the Curfew Bell

When combined with The London Requiem, The Pepys Motet and Oranges & Lemons represent Till’s London trilogy. And yet Till isn’t from London at all, despite his deep understanding of place and history suggesting that the capital runs deep through his veins: he was born and raised in Northampton in the Midlands. “It comes from not having a sense of belonging,” he confesses of his deep affection for London. “That comes from being a Midlander. Nobody talks about the Midlands like its a real place.”

“I think what I’ve done all my life is found myself looking to attach myself to some kind of sense of belonging,” he continues. “I studied in Yorkshire, and I feel a great sense of affinity with Yorkshire, but because I’m a Londoner now I feel a great sense of pride in that. My friend Philippa, who was born in London, says I’m the only person she knows who has become a Londoner. I’ve embraced London in quite a fanatical way. I am an obsessive, and I’ve always been obsessive, and everything I’ve ever done I’ve done with huge obsession.”

That obsession that Till returns to has produced one of the most enriched, enthralling and intricately complex albums you will ever hear, an album where Pepys’s voice is brought to life with vivid colour. It is an album whose significance will only grow, like Pepys’s Diaries has, in its capacity to document London life in all its many guises

The Pepys Motet and Oranges & Lemons album is available from Benjamin’s website. The album will be released on 2nd September to coincide with the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London.

(c) 2016 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence