Reviews
Artist: Lucy Ward
Album: Adelphi Has To Fly
Label: Navigator
Tracks: 11
Website:http://www.lucywardsings.com
There are some album that take me a lot longer to review than they should do. It doesn't happen very often, but there's normally two reasons. The first is negative, I'm playing the album to try and find something of merit worth commenting on. You'll never find a review of those, cause if I can't find anything positive, best say nothing at all.
The second one is that I'm enjoying listening to the album so much, I keep forgetting to put my reviewing head on. So apologies to Lucy for this review being a couple of weeks late, but if you hadn't made such a stunning album it would have been on time, so ultimately it's your fault. :-)
Produced by Megson's Stu Hannah, who also plays on the album and does backing vocals alongside partner Debbie Hannah, Heidi Tidow, Belinda O'Hooley, who also adds piano and bass player Sam Pegg, "Adelphi Has To Fly" is one of the most stunning debut albums I've heard in the last six or so years.
The reason I name check the other musicians up front is because the rest of this review is going to be extolling the virtues of Ms. Lucy Ward and an album rich in songs and promise and I didn't want the other contributors to be missed out.
Lucy Ward hails from Derby and sings with a vernacular accent that captures power and passion, you believe that she cares about every note that passes her lips, whether she wrote it herself or has interpreted the song from somewhere else.
Her songwriting gives a song authenticity because she has explored the reality around it. "Alice In The Bacon Box" sound like it could have been writen in a Victorian workhouse and then sung through the bars at night and into the pubs. It sounds like that because the Alice of the title actually existed and Lucy imagined her into the song.
Moral values and death get a number of outings on the album, "The Two Sisters" and "The Unfortunate Lass" being two songs from the tradition that encompass both, the latter also forms the basis for the cowboy song "Laredo" and also via another root "St James Infirmary", Lucy Ward really knows how to choose her songs as well as perform them.
Her version of "Maids When You're Young" also reminds us that even back a few hundred years or so not all illicit affairs ended with suicide under the bridge, some songs celebrate the act and similarly the revenge song "A Stitch In Time", penned by Mike Waterson, has the wife getting the upper hand and without having to put a body under the patio.
If it sounds like "Adelphi Has To Fly" is a dark album, well it is, but not in the performance. There is real life and vitality in the album, it draws you in and wraps its self around you like a comfort blanket and proceeds to tell you stories.
"Adelphi Has To Fly" is a songsmiths album. The apprenticeship that Lucy Ward has served before and since being a finalist in the young tradition award a couple of years back has served up a mistress of the craft and an album worthy of recognition right across the acoustic spectrum and beyond.
On Lucy's website, she makes the statement that she'd like to be Debbie Harry, who knows with this album under her belt, in folk terms at least, she just might be.
Neil King