Seems like we’re only a few days into 2018 and we’ve already had some brilliant new tracks. Here’s another one, maybe the best. Trembling Bells return with ‘Christ’s Entry Into Govan, a Leige & Leif slice of freak folk, that has this startlingly brilliant arrangement, full of intricate guitars and lovely harmonies, but it’s so packed full of ideas and melody that its staggering. And if that wasn’t enough, it winds up into a wild, folk wig out to close.
The influences that seeped into oth the track and the forthcoming album Dungeness are perhaps not what you’d expect. “I’ve never studied music for fear it would kill my interest, or at least railroad my sense of what was creatively possible” says the bands Alex Neilson, which perhaps explains the beautifully elusive metaphors he uses when describing his own music. “Instead, my musical activity has always been nourished by an interest in other things” “Christ’s Entry Into Govan” was inspired by Flemish Expressionist James Ensor’s painting Christ’s Entry Into Brussels.
With a dark new alter ego, Trembling Bells’ Alex Neilson pushes himself into uncomfortable places for his bold and brilliant debut as a solo artist
Opposite Rimbaud and Verlaine’s Victorian love-nest in London’s King’s Cross, in a bedsit up four flights of stairs, sits a folk music veteran wearing aran and corduroy. Pictures of Norma Waterson and Shirley Collins beam from the walls. On the bedside table are the two magazines: Viz and experimental music monthly Wire. “I’ve got a mind like an open sewer,” says Alex Neilson, half-embarrassed, half-proud.
With his riot of red hair, and a talent that hops genres and drops jaws, Neilson has long been folk and psychedelic music’s go-to drummer, a modern Ginger Baker, yelping and skittering on stage. He’s toured the world with Will Oldham, collaborated with avant-garde artists Jandek and Baby Dee, and now drums for folk stalwarts Shirley Collins and Alasdair Roberts, while also being chief songwriter and vocalist for critically acclaimed folk-rock revivalists Trembling Bells.
His debut solo album Vermilion presents him as a provocative, poetic lothario with the alter ego Alex Rex. On record, rose thorns grow in Rex’s throat and he sleeps with girls for their minds as well as their bodies. In person, Neilsen is gentler, and funny, and a considerate shaper of sentences. “It felt too hubristic to release something under my own name,” he says of his recording alter ego. “And in some ways I never liked the name Alex Neilson, but don’t tell my dad.”
Born in Leeds in 1982, Neilson grew up in a council house with his dad, a builder, and his mum, a nursery nurse. “If I have any heroes, it’s them. They were unbendingly tolerant and supportive, buying me a drum kit, piling everything in the back of the car to take me to rehearsals.” He originally only took drum lessons because it meant he could skip physics class. “I’d take 15 minutes walking there, and 15 minutes back to make sure,” he says.
He “discovered pot” in his early teens and the weird records his older brother would play while burning incense in the bath. “Captain Beefheart and the Velvet Underground ruined normal music for me. At 14, I was straight into the darker end of psych, while my friends were into paler stuff like Grandaddy, which I just didn’t get.”
He then got into jazz and early music, and went to study English literature at Glasgow University chiefly for its music scene, before dropping out, not once but twice. There he formed experimental bands Scatter and Directing Hand after getting into folk, particularly the work of English folk singer Shirley Collins, much to the annoyance of his housemates. “I was living inside her records for months at a time, having this slow love affair … they would be banging the door, begging me to turn her off, then for me to move out.” Collins’s stark, uncompromising approach to music captivated Neilson, something he has always kept with him.
His obsession culminated in a 450-mile trip from Glasgow to Lewes to see the singer giving a talk in a pub. He’s still thrilled they’re now friends, let alone that he drummed on her comeback album, Lodestar. “She has an openness and steely determination that is a constant inspiration. And she always had a pot of soup on when we were recording.”
He’s a well-known name on today’s modern folk circuit, but Neilson has never felt he fitted in with the Radio 2 Folk awards crowd. “I’m not interested in the orthodoxy of an institution … but that world does need a clean broom. It’s very conservative, which is strange when the idea of folk goes against the very nature of conservatism. [Folk] passes through people, doesn’t it? It morphs and mutates.” He shrugs. “The concept of authenticity is a red herring, anyway. It’s better to try something new.”
Neilson’s solo project was driven by this desire for new challenges, he promises, rather than ego. “This was about pushing myself into uncomfortable places.” As well he did. Written during a “particularly self-destructive” period in his life in late 2015, Vermilion begins with the Gregorian chant-inspired blues of The Screaming Cathedral, with a chorus telling of “horror heaped on horror”. Please God Make Me Good (But Not Yet) features a girl sticking pins into a voodoo sex doll of him, before he has a “hit on myself”. Getting the worst bits of himself out there was therapeutic and necessary for Neilson. “I wanted songs that spilt out of themselves. The records I cherish most are asymmetrical things, full of blemishes,” he says.
Wild and rebellious British folk band enter adolescence with a howl of song and a glint in the eye.
How strange it is that folk music is so often hampered by politeness, when its subjects are life, death, murder and sex. Subtlety has its values, of course, but it’s still rare to hear a folk artist strain at the leash, bare their teeth. Enter Trembling Bells, one decade and six albums old, about to enter adolescence with a glint in the eye.
Still pivoting around the wild writing and playing of singing drummer, Alex Neilson (recently the percussionist on Shirley Collins’s Lodestar) and the extraordinary soprano of Lavinia Blackwall, Trembling Bells have always sounded quite beholden to their late 1960s influences, recreating Fairport Convention’s longing loveliness or the Incredible String Band’s whimsy without whipping up something of their own. But Dungeness plunges us into louder, darker territories. Named after the shingly Kent headland to which the band made a trip, Neilson said the place felt like the end of the world, and this album’s themes follow suit. The music is a mixture of avant-garde racket and crossover doom-pop potential – fans of PJ Harvey, Nick Cave or Nadine Shah will find entertainments here.
Big Nothing begins softly but bleakly, with a man who can’t be knocked down (since he’s “already on the ground”), and ends with a spiralling, smile-raising, out-of-tune squeal. Death Knocked at My Door is belly-deep soul fed through a folk-horror filter. Knocking on the Coffin is utterly fantastic, a wah-wah-pedal headbanger tailor-made for an Italian horror film, while I’m Coming sees Blackwall’s singing climax wildly. A technically gifted singer who can obviously hit every note perfectly, she lets the seams tear and split here, and the results are addictive [ . . . ]
