Forget the folk, and pass the beer
British folk trio The Staves is New Zealand-bound, but don’t expect gently plucked harps from these selfconfessed ‘‘lager louts’’, writes Grant Smithies.
Oh, dear. Please… make it stop. Yes, they are young and photogenic. Yes, they are sisters. And yes, they sing together in harmonies so golden and glorious as to make the hardest heart crack asunder.
But does every story about English folk trio The Staves have to trowel on the cliches about female folkies being delicate wee flowers with a deep spiritual connection to the British countryside?
In truth, Emily, Jessica and Camilla Stavely-Taylor grew up in suburban Watford, on the commuter belt outside London. They loved pop music rather than folk, singing along to Simon and Garfunkel, The Beatles, Abba and Queen.
They are not ethereal folkie waifs who pluck harps and pick berries in the hedgerows and write their songs with goose quill pens between bouts of milking cows and washing their dresses in the nearest stream.
‘‘Oh, my God, no!’’ says Camilla from a snowy street in Minneapolis, where the trio has been playing a few shows alongside Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and taking an extended break to write their new album.
‘‘People love to romanticise acoustic singer-songwriters, don’t they? Especially if they’re women, and there’s a whole extra layer with us being sisters.’’
The siblings find this hilarious. ‘‘It’s irritating, but we generally just laugh our a....s off. People picture us all living together in some sugary sweet family Von Trapp situation, striving to make our music as light and pretty as possible.
‘‘They imagine we live in a cabin in the woods, where we never fight or swear or raise our girlish voices. There’s probably a weaving loom in the corner, you know? And we never watch TV either, because we’re too busy doing embroidery by candlelight each evening, after we’ve milked the cows and churned the butter.’’
She cracks up, and the sound is far from delicate. It’s a great, gusty, honking guffaw.
‘‘All this stuff is deeply amusing to us, given that we’re actually horrible, gross, foulmouthed lager louts. All this fairy folkie b......s couldn’t be further from the truth.’’
In reality, the giant metropolis of London was just 20 minutes away by train from the StavelyTaylor family home in Watford. Emily, Camilla and Jessica spent their childhoods listening to their parents’ records and learning the songs, with their dad teaching them all to play guitar along the way.
‘‘They had lots of Beatles and Neil Young LPs, and a heap of Motown and Queen, and we would always sing together when friends came over. It was a really social thing to make music for us, growing up. It was our favourite thing to do.’’
The sisters eventually did an open mic night in a local pub called The Horns, their first time singing together in public. Youngest sister Emily was just 14. ‘‘We were surprised at how much fun it was, and how right it felt, so we started playing more gigs in PHOTOS: GRAHAM TOLBERT Watford, then people would contact us to play down in London, which felt like such a big deal. It just gradually snowballed from there.’’
Strapped together by heavyweight producers Glyn and Ethan Johns (Rolling Stones, The Who, The Eagles, Bob Dylan, Ryan Adams, Laura Marling, Kings Of Leon) and declared ‘‘a debut of stellar beauty and hidden depths’’ by Britain’s Daily Mail, their 2012 album Dead& Born& Grown propelled them out of local pubs and onto huge summer festival stages, and they have since released three studio albums, a live record and six EPs.
They sang on records by Tom Jones, Fionn Regan and New York chamber sextet yMusic, headlined at Glastonbury festival, toured the world with cult bands including The Civil Wars, Florence and The Machine, Bear’s Den and Bon Iver.
And now they’re coming here for three shows in early March, playing alongside Beck, Grace Jones and The Libertines at Auckland City Limits, followed by their own headline gigs at the New Zealand Festival in Wellington.
On record and on stage, they’re quite something. Some of their best songs sound wispy and winsome and prim on first hearing, but the surface prettiness often hides subject matter that’s unexpectedly raw and redblooded.
There’s little trace of a childhood spent hollering out Bohemian Rhapsody and Here Comes the Sun and Bridge Over Trouble Waters in the suburbs, apart, perhaps, from an ear for tight harmonies and unshakeable melodies.
Their sound has evolved into a compelling trans-Atlantic hybrid, sometimes leaning more towards the gritty social realism of traditional British folk music, other times recalling the confessional style of singersongwriters that clustered around LA’s Laurel Canyon in the early 1970s: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, The Byrds, The Mamas and The Papas.
‘‘That’s very flattering, because we love those singers. But to be honest, I don’t even really think of our sound as folk music these days. It’s very much harmonybased, for sure, and we grew up on all those Laurel Canyon singers you mention, but our prime influence was probably The Beatles.
‘‘They are the kings, for us. We love mixing tight backing vocals with a pop sensibility, and we’ve moved away from purely acoustic sounds to experiment with the sort of textures you can get from other instrumentation. We’re trying to push ourselves, and see where we end up.’’
Their most recent record captures just such a creative leap. Based around a previous live collaboration they strapped together for a festival convened by Justin Vernon in his Minnesota home town, The Way Is Read finds the sisters working alongside