Reviews

Artist:Joe Bayliss
Album: Grace
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 11
Website: https://www.joe-bayliss.com

Based in Staffordshire, Bayliss has been knocking round the folk circuit for some 12 years, this being his sixth album on which he's joined by Mike Seal on double bass, bass and banjo and Michael Clarke playing Spanish guitar, uke, keyboard and percussion. It's a gentle, mellow affair, his vocals warm and inviting, the playing always in tune with the sentiments and never fussy.

"Why are the good times stolen, not stored for ever more/why is your cupboard empty, when there's plenty in the store", he asks on the rippling opener 'Mayday', an SOS for those whose glass is always half-empty, where the Drake and Rice influences melt unassumingly into his music. A supporter of the Acorns Children's Hospice, the dreamily fingerpicked 'Garden With The Stones', the core melody line evocative of disco classic 'You'll Never Know', is about the charity's memorial garden where parents can leave a pebble in memory of their lost child, "a forget me not story, of the children lost, now found".

The title track with its hushed voice, crooned harmonies and simple circular fingerpicked patterns is, I'd assume, a memorial to his mother and how "she made a world of love and hope, that we called home", having "nothing in her purse …a ton of doubt, and a curse" but "a heart of gold". It's emblematic of the way he weaves emotions from simple images, perhaps best embodied in the music box melody of 'The Old Woolly Jumper', described as a "metaphorical journey of an old, favoured jumper depicting the life of its owner", with the smell of the wool conjuring memories of love ("Following the curves of a sensuous maiden, it only had eyes for her…It covered their skin, when they were thick and thin/sheltered bodies from the northerly winds… an effortless timepiece of joy/Like hiding the wonder of a baby to follow, that then, nuzzled, in close to the breast.") and loss as it now lies "threadbare and lonely, on the back of a chair". Those who appreciate the yarn should also seek out the similarly themed 'Jumper Of Love' by Red Shoes.

Having sung a tribute to a mother, 'Fairground Man' is, with a suitably woozy carousel rhythm, one for a father, the image of the fair moving on a poignant metaphor for death and the stories left untold and words left unspoken ("there's rides, that… I'm missing…I looked in halls of mirrors, for your face/Just to hear you say son, you've done well"). Thoughts of Ralph McTell are not misplaced.

Whether that's actually autobiographical or not, the moody, percussion underpinned 'Smoke & Fire' is definitely anchored in his Black Country roots, its people and industry ("smoke, fire, rattling chains …rolling steel, locks and wheels, the anchors and chains") with its sepia memory snapshots ("Elsie and Ada talk at the gate, the woman who scrubbed her step too late….Father coughing in smoker's haze, bonfire lit on laundry days… Girls play hopscotch, boys take tops off/For goalposts in the road"). The line "Mary's ladies fought the game, a shilling per thou' of links and chains" refers to Mary Macarthur and the Cradely Heath Women who led the women chainmakers strike in 1910.

While the title seems fairly self-explanatory, 'Life is For Living' with its watery guitar and hollow drums is less upbeat than it might sound as he sings "When positive things and upbeat words never come from the down and out/Whatever happened to childhood dreams/What if nothing's the way it seems… living brings memories, and the memories can be the toughest of all/Some people say that life is just a game, but it's a hard one in which to fall"). If that's the wound, it's followed by the salve in the circling fingerpicked 'Keeping Your Head (Above The Water)' and how when you're "losing the battle of the boiling river/Trying to get to the other side/Thrashing around like a drunken ballet" and "every step you take, is just another day to nowhere", its friends who are the "friendly, stepping stones" beneath your feet that keep you from sinking.

He's adept at conjuring pictures in the mind and the corresponding motions, and one of the loveliest tracks here is 'Waiting For The Bride', a simply story about a wedding with the anticipation of the bride's arrival extending from the bells and flower girls to a tearful mother and a "proud dad, happy and sad, sees his little girl, in a twirl of confusion/While a boy waits in a wedding suit, to play a man's part, in affairs of the heart, the best man jokes, like playground pals do". There is, however, a shadow hanging over proceedings as "the bride waits in a deafening sound of silence/Of the undecided heart", a fine illustration of the way he balances the light and the dark in the stories he unfolds.

Opening with a swirl of keys and acoustic guitar, 'Lay Down' heads towards the close with another ragbag of bittersweet memories ("how I missed my father's passing day, and it hurts…I'd look at the leather, green winged, chair, where once my dad, he rested there, like a king, whisky in hand/I'd beat myself from time to time, for all the things, I wanted, reason & rhyme, to know , but it's too late"), weighing regrets with pride ("Now I use the things you used to hold, to turn, humble wood, to gold…Even named a business after you, so the people hear the stories too again,") and, with not the only Dylan nod on the album, a determination to "lay down my fears of yesterday" and seize tomorrow ("the answers I missed, are just blowing in the wind,waiting to be sown, by the seeds in spring, by me and my sons").

It ends, finally, with 'Umbrella Man' (and musical shades of Fred Neill), a journey across the years built upon images of the past ("You smile at me with your slicked back hair/school suit on, going somewhere/ Smiles full of hope & the joy they bring/The picture frames of my favourite things/A young man poses at 21, a confident look with his new suit on/The world at war, has ended its game, only time will tell, if it'll ever change") with him "standing here, telling my story, of the people who've made my hope & glory". Time passes and as "they grow taller than my head held,high", the title offers a poetic image of how fathers protect their family "holding the cover from the wind and rain" but fearful of what happens as "my arm gets weaker as the years roll by".

There's American colours here and there but this is predominantly very English pastoral troubadour folk, Bayliss caressing the heart and calming the mind with his gentle music and the burnished emotions of his words. A state of grace indeed.

Mike Davies

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