Reviews

Artist:Thursday's Band
Album: Speed Bumps Ahead
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 5
Website: https://www.thursdaysband.co.uk/

A Cambridge folk rock quartet comprising frontman guitarist Mark Gamon, fiddle and mandolin player Matt Kelly, bassist David Cammish and guitarist Rhys Wilson, this new EP features three new numbers alongside two reworks which provide the bookends. It opens, then, with 'Weave and Spin', originally on Gamon's solo album Layer, a mandolin and fiddle led dancing melody with lyrics telling of the Huguenot weavers from the South of France who fled religious persecution in 1685, setting up their trade in Britain, but also of those who "took their leave/From Spitalfields to New Rochelle/Helsinki to the Hague" to seek their fortunes, though I'm not sure how they count "Winston Churchill, Judy Garland, Davy Crockett, even Keef" in their number.

The first new number is Wilson's lilting gentle swayer 'The Sea Captain's Bed', the title again fairly self-explanatory as to the reflective subject matter ("He thinks of the years he spent lost out at sea/The creak of the mainsail was music to me/But all these long years leave me fragile and old/And now is the time to go home …He turns to the sea with a tear in his eye/I'll miss you, you devil, he cries"). Kelly takes his turn with the bluesier guitar picking and fiddle swirling 'Detached' with its theme of a sense of alienation from your past, of "Empty rooms/Empty spaces/Forgotten books/Forgotten faces" and "Waiting for another spring".

The remaining tracks are both from Gamon, the first apparently a live favourite, the simple fingerpicked "Leaning on the Bins" a recollection of festival going, from the Isle Of Wight in 1970 with Taste, Tiny Tim, The Doors and Melanie and Bucolic Frolic, the first Knebworth festival in 1974 featuring the Allman Brothers Band and Tim Buckley, to the Beach Boys, Elton John, Sha Na Na and Melanie at Crystal Palace Bowl in 1972 and, the same year, Bickershaw with Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, Donovan and The Grateful Dead and also mentioning the largely forgotten Weeley Rock Festival in 1971, which compensated when the proposed Isle of Wight event fell through, and featured Hackensack, the Edgar Broughton Band and Stray. Though the song title refers not to their habit of exploding dustbins on stage, but rather chilling out "Leaning on the bins - beer tent behind me". However, the song's dutifully loyal to the local highlight of festival going, the Cambridge Folk Festival ("the best of all the music/Lies in close proximity/Just 20 minutes up the road") that, as Gamon notes, has variously seen Isaac Guillory and Rambling Jack, Guy Clark, Townes van Zandt, Bert Jansch, First Aid Kit, Show of Hands "and Baez dancing on with Doctor John".

It ends with 'Cowrie Beach', revisited from the Where The Breakers Roll EP, a reverie of the Cornish landmark "where the breakers roll" and where "The sand between your toes is made of quartz and limpet shell/The mackerel men are coming in to dock", of Newland Rock off Padstow and the Doom Bar, the sandbar at the mouth of the estuary of the River Camel, where it meets the Celtic Sea and "white horses jump the swell", all serving as a musing on life and love ("Some will prosper, some will love, some will come apart/But what we were will never be destroyed").

Lovely music, whatever the day of the week.

Mike Davies

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