Michael Chapman hits 50 at 75, plus The xx, Julie Byrne and more.
With a cast of friends led by Steve Gunn, Leeds’ accidental guitar hero sounds strong in the face of oncoming doom, says Andrew Male. Illustration by Chris Nurse.
"HERE IS A MAN CLOSER TO THE END THAN THE BEGINNING, HAUNTED BY MEMORIES AND AUGURIES."
Michael Chapman
PARADISE OF BACHELORS. CD/DL/LP
Michael Chapman always knew something was coming. Threaded through the young man songs of travel and romance on his first studio album, Rainmaker, recorded in 1969 when the Leeds-born singer-guitarist was 27, were prophetic images of rust and ruin, stones in the pockets and calamitous weather. Similarly, while Chapman’s acoustic guitar could start out sparkling, that harmonic hollow-body hum could easily slip into discord. These intimations of apocalypse weren’t exactly the blues or folk, although Chapman close-studied LPs by electric belters Jimmy Reed, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Big Bill Broonzy; and played alongside Bert Jansch, Davy Graham, and John Renbourn at Cornwall’s Count House and Folk Cottage. And while Chapman certainly pushed the boundaries of the early-’70s singer-songwriter form, there was an observational longing to his songs, a detached egoless drift that often invested his music with a decentred ghostliness, placing him at one existential remove from more cocksure fellow travellers such as Roy Harper and John Martyn. Down the years, Chapman’s unique sound influenced the greats. The greats paid him back in strange ways. David Bowie, whose Hunky Dory sound and vocal approach owed much to Chapman’s 1970 LP Fully Qualified Survivor, borrowed Chapman’s guitarist, Mick Ronson, and never returned him. Elton John, who wanted Chapman as his guitarist, instead cadged his producer, Gus Dudgeon, as well as …Survivor’s string arranger Paul Buckmaster. Chapman, meanwhile, remained in Yorkshire. Fortunes shifted. The ’80s were tough on Chapman, capped by a heart attack in 1990. Meanwhile, his intimations of apocalypse began to influence a new, more generous crowd. Thurston Moore cites Chapman’s 1973 album, Millstone Grit, as a root influence on Sonic Youth and, at the end of the ’90s, a decade spent rebuilding a reputation lost in the ’80s, US gigs saw Chapman fall in with the East Coast avant-guitar crowd, including Pelt’s Jack Rose and Nathan Bowles, The No-Neck Blues Band, and guitarist Steve Gunn, musicians who heard the phantoms in Chapman’s music and brought them to the surface. Rose died in late 2009, and it was at a tribute concert for him in 2010 that Moore encouraged Chapman to make a noise album, and Gunn first had the idea of recording an “American” album with Chapman. The noise LP became 2011’s revelatory The Resurrection And Revenge Of The Clayton Peacock, while the full band album took a little longer. Recorded with Gunn and Bowles, plus guitarist James Elkington, bassist Jimy SeiTang, and Chapman’s long-time friend, ’70s folk legend Bridget St John, at the No-Necks’ Black Dirt Studio in upstate New York, 50 is the first ‘full band’ Chapman LP since 1978’s major label farewell, Life On The Ceiling. It’s also a document of time elapsed since then, a time of hardship, obscurity, recovery, hard travel, perseverance and resurrection. Alongside three new compositions, and a hauntingly sad reworking of That Time Of Night (previously covered by Lucinda Williams), 50 includes reinterpretations of six relatively obscure Chapman numbers – previously released on cassettes and small labels in the ’90s and noughties. Opening track Spanish Incident (Ramón And Durango) sets the mood, with our narrator drinking “rough red wine” in a Basque roadside bar as “the heat rises just like Lazarus”. Nathan Bowles’ bright banjo and backing vocals from St John fill the scene with mountain-side colour yet the feeling remains of something dreadful and unavoidable approaching. That sense of foreboding is also present in Sometimes You Just Drive, a motoring new number inspired by the winter 2015 flooding of Carlisle, Chapman praying to God to make the rain stop before it comes through his door, because “I’m still waiting on my reward”. Elsewhere, on the chilling Memphis In Winter, Chapman’s dancing Fahey-esque guitar and gravelly intonation pull us into a Bluff City hell “out past the end of nowhere”, very possibly populated by the devil himself. Yet alongside the album’s end-of-days feel there is also a valedictory mood, the sense that, as with Blackstar and You Want It Darker, here is a man closer to the end than the beginning, haunted by memories and auguries, and communicating something of their uncanny twilight power. Two of the album’s most impressive moments come with a pair of deeply sad love songs, Falling From Grace and The Mallard, in which Chapman looks back on old flames with a sense of loss and regret. However, the playing on both tracks also suggests a reconciliatory warmth as if, between the darker time of their writing and this new reworking, Chapman has arrived at a wise epiphany. In fact, the more you listen to 50, the more you realise Chapman’s resonant, deep-toned playing, the intricate circling support from Gunn and co, and the hovering warmth of St John’s backing vocals are offering an entirely different path to those on offer in Chapman’s apocalyptic lyrics. Fittingly, the album’s final track, Navigation, finds Chapman lost in the night. A river blocks his path, the bridge is down, and he is too old to find his way home via the stars. On the original 1997 version Chapman sounded smothered, lost, wanting to go further but unable. This time around, preceded by beatific new instrumental Rosh Pina, bathed in the plangent harmonics of triple guitars, backed by Bridget St John’s deliciously whispered vocals, Michael Chapman sounds just fine exactly where he is, deep in the knowledge of what is coming, but finally aware of how far he’s come.