The Memory Band: A Fair Field

In Elsewhere No.01, published in June 2015, we spoke to the musician Stephen Cracknell  about his work and, in particular, the music he releases as The Memory Band, that “imaginary band, built inside a computer and made flesh by the contributions of numerous musicians.” We asked Stephen to be our first interviewee in the pages of Elsewhere not simply because we love the music of The Memory Band, but also because within all the recordings, there is a strong sense of landscape, history and place to be found, alongside the beguiling mix of digital sounds, acoustic instruments and traditional melodies.

The new album – A Fair Field – just released on Static Caravan Records is no exception:

The Memory Band navigate a dream landscape of fading identity, dredging up forgotten histories from old maps, half-filled diaries, government records and lists left inside magazines detailing obsolete television schedules. The music was fed by stories of magical hares and the recollections of ballad sellers bearing placards at the great fairs of times past, the fields of which now lie buried beneath leisure centres, electricity substations, and retail parks. It traces the connection between the headstone of a man killed in Norfolk by the sails of a windmill, the first observations of solar flares, incendiarism, council estates and an old man’s recollection of ploughing the land by starlight in another time.

One of the great appeals of The Memory Band is shear depth of the influences and mix of ingredients that goes into each song.  Take The Bold Grenadier, which you can listen to via the link below. This is The Memory Band’s version of a traditional tune that was arranged by Richard Rodney Bennett for the 1967 film Far from the Madding Crowd. In the spoken word introduction, we hear the voice of Vashti Vincent, who was recorded in the village of Sixpenny Handley in Dorset, England, in 1954, in which she tells the story of how her father bought a ballad about a 19th century murder at a Sheep Fair:

From the vinyl album 'A Fair Field' on Static Caravan. Our version of Richard Rodney Bennett's arrangement of a traditional tune from John Schlesinger's 1967 film version of Far From The Madding Crowd.

Stephen has written about that episode, and more on the creation of A Fair Field and the places that inspired it on Caught by the River.  A Fair Field by The Memory Band is available on Static Caravan Records. The interview with Stephen Cracknell appeared in Elsewhere No.01, which you can buy in our online shop here.

Caught by the River: An Antidote to Indifference

A personal reflection by Paul Scraton:

I can remember the moment I ‘discovered’ Caught by the River very clearly. I was sitting in a café in Berlin with my friend Paul Sullivan and we were discussing bits and pieces to do with his Slow Travel Berlin project. As we talked, he tapped on the keys of his laptop and said to me, “here, have a look at this. I think you’ll really like it…”

I made a note of this website and that evening spent some time taking a closer look. It can be hard to describe exactly what it is… a collection of writing, films, music and more, that are somehow connected and yet are eclectic enough that each visit to the website brings you into contact with something you may have never discovered otherwise. On the about page of their website they tell their story in more detail, but at its core, Caught by the River was “conceived as an online meeting place for pursuits of a distinctly non-digital variety: walking, fishing, looking, thinking. Birdsong and beer. Adventure and poetry. Life’s small pleasures, in all their many flavours. It was – and still is – about stepping out of daily routines to re-engage with nature. Finding new rhythms. Being.”

Beyond the website, Caught by the River has grown to encompass a print fanzine and books; music releases under their own Rivertones record label; appearances at festivals and events of their own, and all along they have kept their core philosophy intact. I feel extremely proud to have been published on Caught by the River, but more than that I have enjoyed being part of this community of folk who follow and support the website and that have provided me with a key link “back home” from my actual home in Germany.

Along the way I have made friends through Caught by the River, many virtual and some in “real life.” Jeff, Andrew, Robin and Diva have also been a great support for Elsewhere from the very beginning, promoting our crowdfunding campaign, running extracts on the website and competitions through their newsletter. Last week, Caught by the River published their fifteenth edition of their print fanzine An Antidote to Indifference, which – disclaimer alert – features a piece I wrote early this year about the Magnetic North and their album Prospectof Skelmersdale.

As well as some previously published work from the website such as my essay on music and place, An Antidote to Indifference also includes original prose and poetry created especially for the fanzine. Including work from, among many other talented folk, Rob St John, Luke Turner, Melissa Harrison, Martha Sprackland and Keshia Glover, the issue has been lovingly put together by Diva Harris, strikingly designed by Louise Mason and deserves a place on the shelf or rolled up in the rucksack of anyone who, despite everything, sees this “world full of endless discovery, innovation, poetry…”

If ever we needed an antidote to indifference it is now. 

An Antidote to Indifference costs six British pounds and can be ordered directly here.

The Library: Down to the Sea in Ships by Horatio Clare

Read by: Marcel Krueger

I awoke on the ferry from Cherbourg to Rosslare from ferry dreams, getting lost while searching for the ferry port in a small Italian seaside village in my slumber. Outside the cabin window, in the violet early autumn dawn I could see the dark shape of Cornwall; St. Ives, perhaps, or Tintagel, across the calm and dark blue sea. I knew that the old ferry that I was sailing on, built in 1987 in Finland, was crossing one of the more busy shipping lanes in the Irish Sea, but of other ships, or the men manning them, there was nothing to be seen. For miles there was only the calm sea, the dark shape of the land and a few seagulls hanging over the waves.

To make the world of the men and their ships – the countless trade vessels and tankers crisscrossing the world’s oceans under the authority of commerce – visible for us landlubbers is the declared intention of Horatio Clare and his book. Joining two very different container ships on their journeys from Felixstowe to Los Angeles and Antwerp to Montreal, he provides us with both a vivid portrait of modern-day sailors and their ships, and an oral history of merchant sailing and its many disasters. He first boards the Gerd Maersk, a large modern container ship sailing around half of the globe under the command of Danish officers and with a mainly Filipino crew (Filipino merchantmen make up an astonishing 75% of the world’s merchant crews) and uses the many stops and locations on the route not only to paint a picture of the daily routine on merchant ships, but also to view his contemporary surroundings through the eyes of past chroniclers of the sea and to present the history of merchant sailing.

Coleridge makes an appearance, and Hayklut, and of course there is Conrad as well. Clare talks about sea battles in the Mediterranean, about grumpy Chinese pilots and all the contents of the containers, forever unseen to the men shipping them. His second journey on board the Maersk Pembroke is quite a different one, on an old ship that does not stop anywhere between leaving the berth and reaching her destination. As Clare states, 'I wanted storms and I wanted a ship nothing like the great Gerd.' This second part of the book and its somewhat narrower setting is mostly concerned with the weather, and uses Richard Woodman's brilliant book The Real Cruel Sea as groundwork to contemplate the fight of the US and UK merchant navies against both the sea and German submarines between 1939 and 1943.

After the first few pages I became somewhat apprehensive, as here Clare seems to praise the sailors and their employer (and provider of the author’s passage on the ships), the Danish shipping giant Maersk, to the skies.  But reading on, the author does not shy away from addressing all the (for us consumers unseen) issues of modern merchant sailing: the fact that Filipino merchantmen are paid 25% less than their European counterparts purely based on their nationality, and that even today stowaways are still being set adrift, sometimes. He also speaks about the environmental influences of commercial shipping and our influence on the world's oceans, about that the ships only use the crudest of fuels when on the high seas:  

'Seen from the perspective of the deep we are alien, a quasi/Martian species inhabiting a universe of almost entirely different physical and temporal conditions. As the Gerd pounds on far above it is as if she is a spacecraft, one of many in her vastly high orbit. Now and then one gropes down, blindly, with a net. Plunder and pollution are our only contributions to the worlds under the sea.'

But this is not a mere criticism of commerce and the men keeping its containers safe for us. Clare, an acclaimed journalist and writer, manages to weave personal portraits of the ship’s officers and crews, their motivation and dreams, into a wider narrative of men at sea. With its fine observations and evocative prose, Down to the Sea in Ships is one of those rare non-fiction books that the reader can get properly lost in, despite its portrait of the reality of life at sea. In here are pirates, lost fleets on a bitter lake, hundreds of birds hitching rides on ships, and the prohibition of beer on most modern merchant vessels. The Germans have a word for such a book – a Schmöker – a huge tome that is perfect to get lost in on long rainy afternoons in armchairs. Or on ferry voyages across the Irish Sea.

Down to the Sea in Ships is published in hardcover by Chatto & Windus and in paperback by Vintage.

You can read more reviews by Marcel in all four editions of Elsewhere, available via our online shop.

Postcard from... Conakry

By Tim Woods:

Conakry is a city with few options. Surrounded on three sides by the Atlantic, the only direction in which it can expand is inland. New apartment buildings rise rapidly in the hills to the northeast, with poorer dwellings springing up wherever there’s a gap in between. Yet the city’s heart remains in Kaloum, out on the peninsula’s furthest tip and where the main port, markets, office blocks and government ministries are found.

The result? Traffic clogs the three main highways to Kaloum from before sunrise to long after dusk. My taxi to Ratoma – barely a quarter of the way through the city’s total area – takes more than two hours; the driver’s frequent attempts at a short cut being beaten by potholes, floods or others with the same idea. 

“Traffic’s quite a problem in Conakry,” I venture.
 “Problems have solutions,” he smiles. “Here, traffic is just life.”