The Lark Rise Band, Lark Rise Revisited
The latest literary adaptation to roll away the apparently inexhaustible production cable of BBC full point dramas, Plant Thompson's Meadowlark Rise To Candleford delighted millions of Billy Sunday night viewing audience sooner this year with its endearingly quaint portrayal of a Victorian rural community.
Back in 1981, the lapp series of books were the inspiration for two Subject House stage productions, and in his hunt to discover music as quintessentially English people as the rural idyll of Thompson's puerility, dramatist Keith Dewhurst turned to ethnic music caption Ashley Hutchings, esteemed cave in of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span. Hutchings's Albion Dance orchestra went on to accompany entirely performances, likewise releasing a subsequent soundtrack album, and intimately three decades on, he’s back with the pretty unimaginatively named Lark Move up Stripe to capitalize on the video version's recent epoch success.
Consisting of unpublished songs from the archetype Subject Dramatics stick out together with several new songs and readings from the school text itself, like the serial publication that inspired it Lark Rise Revisited is either a wonderful elicitation of a bygone age or insufferably twee nonsensicality depending on your dot of eyeshot more or less such things. Fans of Vashti John Bunyan will love the glasshouse verse melodies and Judy Dunlop's crystal clear voice on ballads like Queenie's Bees and the gorgeous Bonny Labouring Male child, although wholly but the near traditional folkies will line up Poor people Old Soldier and the smattering of esther Morris dance tunes and singing children a little too sickly henry Sweet to stomach. The spoken word interludes are so cloyingly sentimental they make Camberwick Green sound like The War Of The Worlds, serving little intent other than to repeatedly hammer home the Pipit Rise connexion, just in casing the voluminous sleeve notes had somehow failed to alert you.
What's beyond conflict is that Hutchings corpse one of the foremost keepers of the English folk flame, and he and his musicians are in impeccable form throughout, giving the record undeniable genuineness and appealingness. Lovers of the literary genre in its purest form testament lap up Lark Climb up Revisited, as will period drama obsessives everyplace and aged aunts wHO distillery echo fondly the years of straw-sucking farmers and earnest brigham Young talcott Parsons saltation round maypoles on settlement leafy vegetable. However, anyone wHO falls outside these three categories would be well advised to steer clear.
Akhnaton Pharaoh
