Music Arcades: Charlotte Greig: Down in the Valley

2000

The opening track from this album, Trees, was played on Mixing It. I can't remember what it was about it that I liked. Maybe it was the idea of sampling old traditional songs (Trees features an old recording of Walter Pardon singing The Trees They Do Grow High).

If it was, then I ought to have been disappointed by the rest of the album, since it has no other such samples. But instead I loved it, and it was one of my favourites of that spring and early summer.

I love all the elements of the sound: the great voice, the deep, wheezy harmonium and the leathery thud of what may be an old beatbox or could be Phil Moxham's drums. Then there's the odd trad. arr. tune, but they blend so well with the originals that it's often only the antiquated turn of phrase that betrays the former. And the originals are my favourites, particularly Take Me Home, one of the great sub-genre of songs about love affairs that never happened. In this case it's quite a steamy one: "I never never lay down beside you / Climbed up over your body / And guided you… anywhere". All that did happen was in the mind: "But once I stood next to you / Closer than I need to," and then later he touches her back ("it felt naked through my clothes") and when she got home she took off her shirt to "just to see what I would feel like to you".

Nicky Rossiter also loves this song, but thinks it's sung by a young girl. Maybe. She sounds like a woman of experience to me (though they start young these days, so you never can tell, tut, tut). Which is why I think of the song in the company of Roy Harper's Another Day. I suggested the two songs to Gideon Coe for his Wednesday Wist Wagon slot a few months ago, but he only played Another Day.

2008

I mentioned before that I'd failed to make Charlotte Greig fans out of any of my friends. But at the same time as listening to Winter Woods in January, I listened to Down in the Valley once more. I was so taken with it that I immediately ordered the two albums of Charlotte's that I didn't have. I got a message back saying that there was a "buy two get one free" offer on her website. I explained that, once I had the two I'd asked for, I would have a complete set and no need of more — but if I were sent another copy of Down in the Valley, I would give it to someone else to have another at seeding another fan. I gave it to my friend Katherine, who wrote back two days later,

I just wanted to thank you for the CD — it’s wonderful — the sort of voice and music and lyrics which seem to me to conjure up all sorts of myths and Hardy-esque references and so on. It made me cry in fact, which was not ideal on the M40 — specially as (as I discovered the other day) women’s vision is already impaired at night, relative to men’s, due to their distribution of rods and cones.

At last. Definitely one of my top 50.