Southeast London has always been rock and roll's unfashionable younger sibling — not the mythologised Notting Hill of Joe Strummer, not the Brixton of Bowie, but something quieter, more stubborn, more honest. It is fitting, then, that *The Perry Vale Sessions* feels less like a carefully curated artistic statement and more like a document — eleven songs pulled, blinking, from the light of a recording room where something real was happening, even if nobody was quite sure what it was yet.
Marksberry himself admits as much. The songs were captured across multiple sessions without a fixed concept, the kind of creative sprawl that has produced some of the finest records in the folk-rock canon. Think Dylan during the Basement Tapes period — not the imperial version of Dylan, but the human one, messing about with musicians he trusted, finding shapes in the dark. That Marksberry lists Young, Dylan and Richard Thompson as touchstones is not mere name-dropping; it's a statement of intent. He is interested in songs that last. He is interested in truth over polish.
The production, handled by the estimable Pat Collier — a man who has wrestled sonic chaos from The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Wonder Stuff — is deliberately raw. This is not the rawness of incompetence; it is the rawness of restraint, of someone knowing when to put the faders down and let the room breathe. Recorded partly at Perry Vale Studios and partly with David Holmes at the legendary Lightship 95, the album has a physical quality, a sense of bodies in a room, of amplifiers humming with something to say.
Side A opens with *Bolt of Lightning* and moves through the cinematic *Noon Day Gun Salute* — where Grammy-nominated drummer Tonny Morra provides a backbone of genuine rhythmic authority — before settling into the bluesy warmth of *Moonshine*, where Phil Madiera's Hammond playing curls through the arrangement like smoke. It is on *Let's Ride* and *Hippy World* that Marksberry's electric guitar voice begins to fully emerge; these are songs with grit under their fingernails, story-songs in the Thompson tradition, where the narrative and the melody are inseparable.
Side B is where the record catches fire. *Razor Love* is the standout — propelled by Ramon Yslas's percussion (a veteran of Chicago, no less) and anchored by Madiera's piano, it is a song that sounds like it was always there, waiting to be written. *Pretty Little Irish Belle* has the lightness of early Fairport Convention, while *Gun In My Hand*, the lead single, earns its prominence: direct, urgent, built on a riff that lodges immediately and refuses to leave.
The album's emotional centrepiece, however, is *Mama (What's Become of Me)* — a song that brings in saxophonist Frank Walden, whose credits with Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson speak for themselves. Here, the biographical quality of Marksberry's writing reaches its most tender and exposed, a son's lament rendered without sentimentality but with considerable grace. The closing *Slow Down Time* does precisely what its title promises — it drops the tempo, broadens the frame, and sends the listener out into the world feeling, improbably, slightly more at peace with it.
What Marksberry has made here is a record that improves with each listen, revealing new textures and small emotional details that were invisible on first encounter. His debut received five stars from *Rock n Reel* and was largely a piano-led affair rooted in American mythology. This follow-up is something more personal and, ultimately, more interesting — an artist locating himself not in borrowed Americana but in the particular streets, studios and relationships of his own life.
The Perry Vale Sessions will not trouble the algorithmically optimised playlists of the streaming era. It was not designed to. It was designed to be played loud on decent speakers, ideally with a drink in hand and the evening stretching pleasantly ahead. On those terms, it is a considerable success — the work of a songwriter who is, as he says, finding his own voice. On the evidence here, it's worth listening to.
*— Released 17th April. Available on download, streaming and physical formats.*