Lucy Ward
Album: I Dreamt I Was A Bird
Label: Betty Beetroot
Tracks: 9
Website: http://www.lucywardsings.com

I remember seeing Lucy perform right at the start of her career, at tentative if even then wildly confident gigs; I was both captivated and distinctly impressed, while privately believing that she would either burn herself out rather fast or else go on to greater things and mature artistically, equally fast. I really rooted for the latter course, and I’m so glad that I was proved right, for she’s come on in leaps and bounds over a very short timespan, catapulted by winning the Horizon Award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards back in 2012.

Lucy’s both maintained and built on the sense of sheer presence that characterised her early appearances, the force of her personality proving as stunning and in-control as ever on each successive CD release. Her debut full-length disc Adelphi Has To Fly was a truly fearless exercise, and a hard act to follow, but her next album, 2013’s Single Flame, found her spreading her wings, taking a flight of fancy and a greater leap of faith and landing on her feet, finding an ideal producer-collaborator in Megson’s Stu Hanna, whose trademark attention to detail and acute feel for well-matched textures proved a great foil for Lucy’s striking personal and musical visions.

And so it goes with followup I Dreamt I Was A Bird, where Lucy once again enjoys the exceptional production and multi-instrumental skills of the redoubtable Mr Hanna. This formidable, proven collaboration delivers a keenly configured soundscape possessing a detailed majesty and assurance that so brilliantly complements Lucy’s heady invention and luscious flamboyance, this in turn being mirrored in the exotically-plumaged Lucy that’s portrayed in her latest publicity shots. The forthright diva persona she conjures is no mere front, for the measure of her talent goes much deeper than a superficial, mistakenly perceived gloss of unbridled confidence and shallow showiness might otherwise indicate. Lucy is nothing less than an outstanding, and defiantly individual, interpreter of both traditional and contemporary song, and has developed her art into that of a formidable singer, while she’s also been increasingly acclaimed for her own passionate, compassionate and savvy (and intensely versatile) original songwriting. With I Dreamt I Was A Bird Lucy’s taken an intelligent approach to her chosen central theme of “being grounded, being of the landscape whether urban or rural”, once again playing to her strength of writing about real people and moments, inspired by incidental overheard comments, chance conversations, and stories from family history all retold with consummate sensitivity.

It’s equally persuasively that Lucy brings us first a heart-stoppingly magical evocation of an intensely experienced, halcyon summertime romance (with an achingly beautiful chamber-folk setting that spotlights the violin playing of Uiscedwr’s Anna Esslemont) and then a menacingly paced, drama-laden depiction of the drudgery of a millworker’s life (Creatures And Demons, a tremendously powerful song arising from a challenging BBC commission to give voice to the characters of Elizabeth Gaskell’s key novel of social commentary North And South). Similarly, there’s a marked contrast between the profoundly moving Lion (based on the true story of a WW1 rifleman shot for cowardice) and the eerie retelling of the legend of Daniel And The Mermaid, and between the limpid, sunny encounter with a charming little girl in Song For Lola and the decidedly morose, monochrome 50s tale of young Welsh couple Connie And Bud. Not only do all of these songs boast a direct, totally involved quality in their lyrics, but Lucy – with the considerable, not-to-be-underestimated assistance of Stu – achieves their realisation even more convincingly through astoundingly creative, uncannily atmospheric musical settings. The industrial-strength battering percussion on Creatures And Demons, the doleful brass chorale of the Brighouse & Rastrick Band on Lion, the shimmering weird siren-calls of Daniel And The Mermaid – these are striking examples of this creativity. The opulent, sumptuous aural feast may at times arguably seem perched a little precariously on the brink of overload, and yet even a slight degree of excess is more than excusable when it makes perfect sense in its context. As it does, with vengeance, on the album’s lone non-original, a wide-screen drama-laden gothic-punk remake of Lord Randall that would put Siouxsie and her Banshees, Grace Slick or Rose Kemp to shame, complete with crashing, grinding electric guitars and potent air of unresolvable tension. And it’s a brave move, indeed, to end an album on a harsh, discordant doomwatch-laden rant (Return To Earth), which is so broodingly tense and highly-charged that at its conclusion Lucy finds she “can no longer sing”. Wow!…

David Kidman