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HOT GIG TICKETS

MARY HAMPTON + PETE GREENWOOD + Beth Jeans Houghton

Mon 1st Dec 2008

The Luminaire presents
the Greenman Festival Tour
MARY HAMPTON
+ PETE GREENWOOD
+ Beth Jeans Houghton

Doors 7.30
£9 door

"A woman who appears to have spent much of her life attempting to imitate the shimmer of wind-chimes. The effect is mesmerizing." (The Guardian)

London-born Mary Hampton has lived for some time in a room over-looking the sea in Brighton. She released her first, much anticipated album 'My Mother's Children' via Navigator Records in August 2008.

"Coffee-table-shattering purity...these are songs of unnerving delicacy, elemental and acoustic simplicity...potent and enchanting." (**** Uncut)

While studying twentieth century music at university Mary heard her first traditional English folk song quite by chance on a compilation tape made by a friend, in between Frank Zappa and Penderecki. Ever since then she has been rooting about in second hand bookshops and libraries across the land trying to uncover more of these old songs and extract the essence of some of the sensibilities they articulate.

"Songs,which recline with shimmering sensuality in various shady cloaks of weirdness...fragility, desolation and humour." (The Telegraph)

In the past two years, she has recorded two EPs, Book One (6 songs of refusal) and Book Two (6 songs of hunger) both of which contain various arrangements of these traditional songs plus at least one original song. She has recorded with Eliza Carthy as one of The Ratcatchers on Eliza's ‘Rough Music’ and Mary also co-wrote and sang lead vocals on Imitation Electric Piano’s last album, with members of ground-breaking band Stereolab.

"Idiosyncratic,wistful..and deceptively simple...after dark its spooky tentacles embrace you in a shroud of bleakly cracked arrangements and sparce instrumentation...wondrously individual." (Folk Album of the Month **** - Mojo)

She has supported St. Etienne and British Sea Power in Brighton, Bellowhead at London's Scala and Alasdair Roberts on his recent national tour. In 2007 she played for the 1000th anniversary of Oxford (on a bandstand inside a French fire installation), for the 75th anniversary of Cecil Sharp House (home of English Folk Dance & Song Society) and in the exquisite setting of the End of the Road Festival. This year has also seen Mary tour with Adem and play two sets atthis years Greenman Festival, Brecon.

"Terrifying and gorgeous....unusual and strong.....epic and tiny...'My Mother's Children' is an album I know I am going to love for life." (Eliza Carthy, fRoots)

"If Joanna Newsom's spiders-in-the-hair folk floats your tankard, then Brighton's Mary Hampton is the new brew. Spectral and spartan she mixes poety and classical influences into plinking, piano-led folk ballads...giving her debut an exotic, gothic drama." (Q)

Also performing this evening is Pete Greenwood. Raised in Leeds, as a child he would sit at his father's feet and watch him detune his guitar, he learned piano, and grew up steeped in folk music. "Of course I did what any teenager would do which is completely rail against it for a while. My Dad'd sit me down and say 'Listen to this, this is Nick Drake' and I'd go and listen to Megadeth." Somewhere in between he stumbled upon Bob Dylan's 'Lay Lady Lay' and was awed. "I stayed up all night listening to records," he remembers of that somewhat inebriated evening plum in the middle of his teenage years. "And I must've listened to 'Lay Lady Lay' about 25 times before I fell asleep."

Although he also plays with The Loose Salute and The See See, Greenwood's heart lies in writing his own material, and for the past two years he has been enjoying exploring the strange new world of songwriting. The result is less of an album and more of a sort of musical trellis; twelve songs of structure and rigidity and lush lyrical sprawl, all told in his soft, earthy tones. It is a collection of songs that tethers him to a narrative songwriting tradition.

There are many extraordinary things about Pete Greenwood's debut record — the imagery that casts between "the canyon's twisty trees" and "cash on the bedside to pay the funeral bills", the guitar-playing that is fine and translucent and new-stemmed, but perhaps the most remarkable thing of all on an album of such rich, ripened subtlety is the fact that Greenwood has only been writing songs for less than two years.

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