The Monday Morning Brew #84
Our first Monday Morning Brew of 2025 is an eclectic offering that includes music from Bridget Hayden, the 70s loner folk music of Trevor Beale, Marta Del Grandi, Papa M, Arthur Russell and more.
Our first Monday Morning Brew of 2025 features music from Alice Hebborn, Marta Del Grandi, Bridget Hayden, Trevor Beale, Damien Jurado, Mari Mathias, Rachel Sermanni, Daisy Rickman, Broadcast, Sonny Smith, Nathalie Joachim, Harrison R. King, Marehemu George Mukabi, Papa M, Arthur Russell, Brién, Outliers, Makushin, Peiriant, Constant Follower, Laura Loriga. The listen links (for Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and YouTube) are further down this page.
Keep an eye on KLOF Mag this week for a review of Bridget Hayden’s Cold Blows the Rain, her new eight-song collection released via the Todmorden-based label Basin Rock.
Todmorden, a market border town in West Yorkshire, has a habit of embracing the weird and wonderful. The press for this release shares how, through the thick of Winter, every season, in fact, the town’s folk are used to the wind and rain, fog and mist. As much a part of the town as the trademark deep valley it sits in, here, the lay of the land invites the weather in, just as it does the many musicians, artists, and unique characters that have come to call the place home over the centuries.
Other well-known residents include Jake Blanchard, who is well known for his striking artwork, which can be found on album covers as well as books, independent brews, and more. His cover art for Richard Dawson’s The Ruby Cord was awarded third place in the Art Vinyl Album Cover of the Year Award 2022.
In a preview of Blanchard’s exhibition, KLOF’s Gareth Thompson wrote of how Blanchard’s work delves into a world of both familiar and outlandish beings, surrounded by a created mythology and folklore from an alternative evolutionary and cultural history. The exhibition will feature over sixty new works, including paintings, prints, drawings, masks, ritual objects and instruments, all rendered in Blanchard’s signature psychedelic style.
Close-by to Todmorden is another well-known location - the market town of Hebden Bridge, which, like Todmorden, is also often perceived as a bohemian backwater. A resident you should check out is 70s British folk artist Trevor Beale. Basin Rock (also based in Todmorden) released Beale’s never-before-heard album, Fireside Stories, in 2022, which he had recorded by himself in the attic of his family home in Hebden Bridge when still a teenager, sometime between 71-74 – when the mills were closing down and before the hippies arrived.
According to the excellent sleeve notes of ‘Fireside Stories’, written by Benjamin Myers, “The first seeds of Hebden Bridge’s famed independent streak had been sewn as far back as the 1850s when a co-operative movement was formed by workers in the cloth industry. Over time, those seeds of radicalism and collectivism ensured Hebden Bridge evolved into a place where people could be themselves and all shades of individual oddness not only tolerated but actively encouraged.”
In contrast, he adds: “But back at the turn of the dreary 1970s, it nevertheless remained a monochrome world defined by its unforgiving surrounding landscapes, where the old gritstone over-dwellings were stained with soot, rain lashed down for weeks, and during the darker seasons the sky pressed down like a coffin light. ‘Valley bottom fever’ is the term that locals use to describe the portentous feelings of gloom and entrapment that grip in midwinter.”
Beale found escape or a means of expression through his guitar, which he began playing at the age of ten and then, inspired by the likes of “Bob Dylan, Django Reinhardt, The Byrds, Dave Evans, and James Taylor”, he began writing and playing his own songs, “…performing them at local (though often remote) folk clubs and pubs such as The Cross Inn and The White Lion (both in the hill-top village of Heptonstall), The Shoulder Of Mutton (at Blackshaw Head) and The White Hart (Todmorden).”
What sets Beales’ loner-folk apart from many at that time, besides a voice that belies his age, is, as Myers says, his “suffer-no-fools sense of realism that is defiantly Northern”. The music is incredibly striking, as Myers says:
“Here is a postcard from the past at that crucial musical period of transition, when the idealistic exponents of the 1960s emerged into an austere new decade that was to be shaped by strikes, rising unemployment and economic upheaval.”
Read our album review of Fireside Stories here.
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