Review | Songlines

All Life is Here

Rating: ★★★★

View album and artist details

Album and Artist Details

Artist/band:

Harp and a Monkey

Label:

Moonraker Records

June/2014

Harp and a Monkey, as the abrupt band name suggests, are a plain-speaking Lancastrian folk group. Frontman Martin Purdy tells tales of local people and everyday concerns in a clear, proudly Mancunian voice without dissimulation. His glockenspiel’s sharp ringing sounds curiously electronic alongside Andy Smith’s programmed samples of laughter, children talking and general murmur. The music builds in repetitive layers of plucked banjo and harp, Simon Jones’ whining viola and the undulations of the accordion.

Old Lancashire folk songs such as ‘Bolton’s Yard’ and ‘Pay Day’ are reworked to juxtapose 19th- and 21st-century mill-workers, migrants and medical conditions. Of their self-penned tracks, the striking ‘Tupperware and Tinfoil’ has the self- deprecating air of classic Pulp, sung to a melody that harks back to the folk song ‘Bobby Shafto’.

Even where the subject matter drifts to foreign lands - ‘The Gallipoli Oak’ - it still follows a local boy. The latter begs the obvious question: what was a young man from Rochdale doing trying to bring ‘the Turks to their knees’ in a distant land? Thought-provoking archival rummaging has resulted in lively, inventive folk delivered in a down-to-earth manner.

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