Hamish is no newcomer. He has spent three decades on the British subculture scene, and he founded the Rabbit Hole at Glastonbury, where he made a habit of backing young talent from every genre. A man who has spent that long handing the microphone to other people tends to write with a generosity that shows. These songs are interested in everyone in the room, and the album’s title reads as a roll call of friends, family and collaborators rather than a pun.<\/p>
Hamish’s stated creed is “a good melody and good words”, and he cites Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Al Stewart, James Taylor, Bowie, Queen, Radiohead and Rufus Wainwright as company. The titles alone show where his ambitions lie. “I’d Never Make It Through” opens the record with a confession, and “Bruhaha” follows with a wink. Together they make the two stand-out openers the artist himself singles out. “The Worm Forgives The Plow” has the pastoral turn of phrase of a writer who has read his Larkin and his Laurie Lee, and “Funny One” ends with a flourish for Verdi, an operatic gesture that only a songwriter secure in his own voice would risk.<\/p> The emotional spine is a triptych of songs written just after the births of his three children: “Helpless (Song For Pip)”, “I’m Prepared To Wait (Song For Grace)” and “Love All Around (Song For Noah)”. Scattering them through the sequence rather than clumping them together was a shrewd decision. They surface like family photographs found between the pages of an old book. Lullabies written by new fathers are a perilous genre, and sentiment can curdle into saccharine in a bar. Hamish avoids the trap by keeping to plain feeling and plain speech, in the tradition of Paul Simon and Nick Drake.<\/span><\/p> Elsewhere the titles suggest a writer unafraid of the harder end of life. “Borrowed Time”, “I’d Like To Say I’m Sorry”, “I Struggled” and “The End Is Always Hard” sit alongside “Close The Bedroom Door” and “Short Sharp Shock Of Your Love”, and they hint at the years of work, family trouble and mental health difficulty that delayed the album. The sequence moves from nervous opening to the closer, “The End Is Always Hard”, a title that feels earned after a journey this long. Between them sits “Don’t Try And Break My Heart”, the song that has Hamish’s parents, aged 90 and 80, dancing in the kitchen. A tune that gets two generations of one family on their feet has passed a test no star rating can measure.<\/span><\/p> Chris Oldfield deserves particular credit. His production is the quiet kind, which polishes without laminating. Ableton and good microphones do the technical work, but the room’s character stays intact: local musicians, a fire-pit’s worth of neighbours, a shaker improvised from a tin of rice. The record keeps the warmth of a place where people actually made music together.<\/span><\/p> Hamish measures success in goose-pimples, and by that unfashionable yardstick this album scores often. Nothing here chases a playlist or a trend. It sounds like a man telling the truth about his life to people he trusts, and it rewards anyone who listens in the same spirit.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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