Home and Identity: Ringlefinch’s ‘Tall Tales’
When growing up, you might have been accused of telling a ‘tall tale’. That is, a story that might well be true, but with quite unbelievable elements. I used to tell other kids in the playground that I’d broken my back from falling out of a tree once. True, I had fallen out of a tree during my sister’s birthday party when I was five – but I’d never broken my back. Most kids grow out of telling tall tales. Others take it with them into adulthood and turn it into an album. This is what Ringlefinch has done with their record ‘Tall Tales’.
Ringlefinch. From left to right - Nicole Teszke, Philip Briggs, Arun Entwistle, William Rengifo, Graham Parrish, Andy Logan and Gillian Hunter-Gibbs. Image Credit: Liat Wicks.
London alternative folk band Ringlefinch are not nearly new on the scene. Forming in 2012, their debut EP ‘Mass Trespass’ was released in 2014 and produced by Ben Walker, whose credits include working with Josienne Clarke, Kirsty Merryn and Roxanne de Bastion. Ringlefinch’s 2019 follow-up was self-produced and entitled ‘Gory Stories’, a small collection of Halloween themed songs including one that would later appear on their album.
With changes in personnel over the years, Ringlefinch release this album as a seven-piece, with songwriter, vocalist, and all manner of strings instrumentalist Andy Logan as the captain of the ship. Andy is joined by Arun Entwistle on acoustic guitar, Emma Hamilton on cello, Graham Parrish on bass guitar, violinist Nicole Teszke, Philip Briggs on mandolin, and percussionist William Rengifo. Former member Gillian Hunter-Gibbs also recorded viola for much of the album prior to her departure from the band. All players contribute backing vocals too, together building the sound that makes up Tall Tales.
The album begins with ‘Edward Gorey’s Gory Stories’, the opening piece from 2019’s ‘Gory Stories’ EP and co-written by Andy Logan and Philip Briggs. The song opens with a myriad of atmospheric sounds, provided by William Rengifo, who is credited with foley across the record.
‘I read Edward Gorey’s Gory Stories when I was far too young, if I’m an open book, come choose your own adventure, or has the tiger got your tongue?’
You’d think with a band of seven musicians, the sound would be overpowering at times, but it’s certainly not. The voice of Andy Logan is sweet and inviting, and the voices of his fellow musicians are equally so, gently harmonising with his. The production and mixing, also helmed by Logan, separates the many stringed instruments beautifully. Look one way and you’ll hear Arun Entwistle’s acoustic guitar, look the other and there’ll be Logan’s ukulele and the mandolin playing of Philip Briggs.
The music video is a great visual introduction to Ringlefinch, featuring the full band performing and fleshing out their own Gory Stories, directed by Andy Logan and Uli Kilian. See Graham Parrish misplace his bass, Emma Hamilton’s cello going flat, and Nicole Teszke’s murderous rampage!
If you were to purchase the CD edition of Tall Tales, you’ll find Andy’s notes on each song which help to set the scene for the stories within the music. ‘The Prince Of Poyais’ is a song about conman Gregor MacGregor who, in the early 1820’s, convinced would-be settlers in England that a country named Poyais was something of a promised land. Parting with their cash and giving it to MacGregor to purchase plots on Poyais, once they sailed out into the Atlantic and arrived, they realised the country was nothing but a barren wasteland.
Co-written by Logan and Arun Entwistle, The Prince Of Poyais is pacey, with the rhythm section in Parrish and Rengifo underpinning the thick strumming instruments that fill out the meat of this song. This is where the backing vocalists come into their own as you envisage the future colonists of Poyais calling out ‘New land!’, ‘New life!’ even as Logan’s perspective of a cobbler puzzles over MacGregor’s absence on the day they are set to leave from the docks. Once the horror of their fate settles in after their arrival, those same colonists can be heard shouting ‘The end,’ ‘is nigh!’ Most of the colonists did not meet a satisfying end.
Andy’s notes on ‘Making It’ are a comfort, especially the line: ‘Success is just a story that people tell about themselves.’ Indeed, the smallest of achievements can be celebrated by someone, but this song is about (and for) the people who muddle through, or make it up as they go along.
Making It is also Ringlefinch’s latest single, opening with what sounds like reversed string sounds before hitting the listener with anthemic vocals I can imagine hearing audiences chant back in the flesh. In the quieter moments of Making It, the lower backing vocals are expertly executed by the band. As well as this, Emma Hamilton and Nicole Teszke’s cello and violin performances really shine on this track.
With Ringlefinch having created much of the soundtrack for the 2015 Stephen Glover directed film ‘Making It’, the band’s music video for this song revisits that film and the team who helped create it. This presentation stars Richard Crawley as George, though you might spot a few members of Ringlefinch as supporting cast…
There’s so much beauty and balance in the opening refrain from ‘Tongue In Cheek’. Where there are string players of all shapes and sizes in this band, they manage to cover all the frequency bases. I implore you to listen in headphones to how all these instruments interact with each other. In a change of proceedings, Tongue In Cheek’s lead vocals are shared between Andy Logan and Gillian Hunter-Gibbs singing in harmony. For a song that has its roots in relationship upset, it’s really quite soothing.
‘A stray word escapes, like an angry bee, it buzzes around, kind of spitefully I bat it away - it settles down to wait, like the days-old fish going stale on her plate.’
The first verse of ‘Just Enough Rope’ might lead you to think this is more of an Andy Logan solo piece, with the lone lead vocal and sparse acoustic guitar chords, but with the second verse comes the rest of the band. Much of the beat is accented with strummed chords, the bassline from Graham Parrish taking steps forward in line with William Rengifo’s cajon playing. Breaking up this beat are the cello and violin performances from Emma and Nicole, which glide over this piece and make it shine.
The story of Just Enough Rope is of a man suffering from depression throughout life, described as being accompanied by an alarming young man, whose understanding of him grows over the years. My favourite lines in particular are: ‘He said, "I'm wearier than my few years should allow, and the sanctity of my silence is a sham. I know I must get through this all somehow, but days I don't remember who I am."’
For much of the verses on ‘Ophelia’, the band is sedate with a simplified arrangement around acoustic guitar and centring on Andy Logan’s words. My favourite of these verses is: ‘Your grief has cold blue fingers, your grief has weeds in its hair, whenever you turn to confront it, it’s not there.’
The album liner notes explain that the songs are by Andy Logan, but the music is by Ringlefinch. I think this is especially true with Ophelia which seems to be split down the middle. The first half is the song, with Logan’s lyrics, but the second half is where the band truly takes over and makes it their own. Philip Briggs’ mandolin turns like a clock, while William Rengifo’s percussion has a healthy helping of reverb, making his part more assertive than before. The bowed string section really is the mood-setter here, so rich is their playing, it must have been dazzling to be in the room while those parts were being recorded. The closing moments of Ophelia see the rest of the band drop out, leaving only Briggs and Arun Entwistle on acoustic guitar, helping you appreciate all the vital components that build a piece such as this.
The short but sweet ‘Woolpacks’ is a solo cello piece performed by Emma Hamilton and written by Andy Logan, inspired by ‘a scattered group of gritstone boulders standing on the flank of Kinder Scout in the Peak District.’ Much like the final seconds of Ophelia, Woolpacks highlights an element of this record that is always there, but allows you to appreciate its distinctive sound in isolation.
This is the perfect time to discuss the artwork, with photographs shot by Andy’s father Will Logan in 1990. The front cover depicts an old mill chimney in the process of demolition, though the other photos included in the physical package show it standing tall. British steeplejack Fred Dibnah would be in attendance for the chimney’s felling.
I love how the first verse of the Briggs and Logan co-write ‘Gone South’ alludes to Bacharach and David’s ‘(They Long To Be) Close To You’: ‘Tell me why do birds, suddenly disappear, gone in a gust of feathers and dust, every time she draws near…’
Musically, it sounds like nothing of the sort. In fact, despite the subject matter of a man dreading the coming of winter, it’s quite a jolly song. Banjo bounces along with acoustic guitars, and Nicole Teszke takes a violin solo with the jovial sound broken at its conclusion. The brief guitar solo in Gone South sounds like an acoustic guitar put through an amp with a blues style crunch, the more string-like quality of an acoustic instrument shining through. The band return for one more verse, making sure the listener knows they’re going south for the winter.
A song co-written with Gillian Hunter-Gibbs and Nicole Teszke, ‘Dust & Stones’ is a raising of glasses to our ancestors. You can hear the composers’ influence in the music as the melody runs through the string performances. To your right, that could well be Logan playing charango, an instrument from the lute family which perfectly compliments Briggs’ mandolin performance. Andy Logan’s words are more descriptive than before, reading like the narration of a wake:
‘At this buffet of woe, there’s enough to go round. Come pile up your plate, if a plate can be found. Eat, make merry, but don't meet the eyes, set deep in the masks that are gathering by. Dance through the hollows with barely a sound, let the dogs take the scraps that fall to the ground.’
The only song on Tall Tales not written originally by the band is called ‘The Masochism Tango’. A lusty tale of black comedy penned by Tom Lehrer in the 1950’s, it would still make some audiences recoil in the New Twenties, let alone more than sixty years ago. I, however, am fully supportive of this lyrical masterpiece, which is brilliantly reinterpreted by Ringlefinch and embellished with strings, mandolin, acoustic guitar and percussion. Essential listening for anyone who has sustained injury during an impassioned tango.
Alice Quayle contributes bassoon to ‘Pomme De Lune’, Ringlefinch’s attempt at writing a sea shanty for the Pennines…located miles from any large body of water. Andy calls it ‘an anti-sea shanty’. It certainly has that lyrical vibe to it, telling the story of a man who grew up in the mountains to build a contraption that would sail the skies at night:
‘Yo, heave ho! My Pomme de Lune, not quite a boat, nor yet balloon. Yo, heave ho! My Pomme de Lune, I stole the key, we're leaving soon...’
The story is told in the best way it could be – through animation. Created by Mariana Leal, who also made the small animated segment in the ‘Making It’ video, the decision to not actually reveal what the contraption looks like is a good one. Instead, the viewer is given a series of ideas of what it could be, leading you to make up your own mind.
The closing piece on Tall Tales could well be an entire EP in itself. The sixteen-minute epic ‘Coldwell Clough’ is a tale told in eight parts – I: A River Nearby, II: Halfway Down The Coffin Trail, III: Mam Tor, IV: Easter Eve At The Mermaid’s Pool, V: Kinder Downfall, VI: Bleaklow Stones Part I, VII: Mass Trespass Part II and VIII: Bleaklow Stones Part II.
Rooted in identity, Andy Logan seeks to ask the question: ‘How does where we’re from shape our sense of who we are?’ Indeed, Andy speaks at length in our Q&A about the subject of Coldwell Clough, so I’ll stick to discussing the music.
‘I: A River Nearby’ starts Coldwell Clough with bare acoustic chords under Andy’s lyrics, ‘I never get lost with a river nearby, I just follow the water, learned to keep my feet dry…’ The band joins piece by piece, first Graham Parrish’s bass, then William Rengifo’s percussion and acoustic guitar from Arun Entwistle. Bowed strings are intermittent as Act 1 of Coldwell Clough builds up, finishing as Logan urges you to ‘listen for the water’. This Act makes up a quarter of the entirety of this song.
Bass guitar, with Rengifo’s cajon brings in ‘II: Halfway Down The Coffin Trail’ before being joined by mandolin and tense notes from Nicole Teszke and Emma Hamilton. The lyric is hushed, with vocal backing from the other musicians; ‘Halfway down the Coffin Trail, nine more miles to go. The fog crept in while we looked up and stole the world below…’
A harsh stop brings in ‘III: Mam Tor’, where if you listen closely, you can hear rare electric guitar played by Andy Logan. Added handclaps are a good arrangement decision in Mam Tor, which is largely dominated by violin over the strummed instruments. Act III’s subject matter is rooted in death: ‘She shrugged off the road like yesterday's shroud, and cast it aside on the valley floor below; So they carry their dead up the roof o' the world, and I turn off their trail and climb on alone up Jacob's Ladder, past Edale Cross, to the Mermaid's Pool.’
A moment is left as the last chord dies away, then is picked up by Entwistle on acoustic guitar. The arrangement following is one of my favourites on Tall Tales, with Philip Briggs joining the chord progression on mandolin, then pizzicato strings from Hamilton and Teszke while William Rengifo keeps the rhythm. More gorgeous backing vocals occasionally echo Logan’s words: ‘Chasing myth across the moors, chasing our tails, and any grand old lie.’ The overall mood of ‘IV: Easter Eve At The Mermaid’s Pool’ is more chilled, and narratively works very well following Mam Tor.
Accented parts on percussion, mandolin and acoustic guitar bring in the instrumental ‘V: Kinder Downfall’. Handclaps change the pace as the focus shifts across the members of the band without being too obvious, first the strummed instruments, then the bowed ones.
Strumming charango from Andy Logan signals the coming of the next Act, ‘IV: Bleaklow Stones Part I’. Listen closely to hear his pick gently impacting the instrument, putting you right in the room with him. This Act marks the beginning of the end, as Andy sings comfortably of home: ‘Come, take me home, to Coldwell Clough and the Bleaklow Stones. We'll watch the lights in the valley below as the night pulls down and near…’
A brief pause, then the sole composition by Arun Entwistle commences, ‘VII: Mass Trespass Part II’. Naturally driven by acoustic guitar, this is wonderfully interpreted by the band, adding body to Arun’s beautiful piece. A continuation of the title track to their first EP, the landmark story of the Mass Trespass is detailed in the album’s liner notes and by Andy Logan below.
The ending of Coldwell Clough is brief, but no less significant. The second part of Act VI concludes here with ‘VIII: Bleaklow Stones Part II’. Nicole Teszke’s violin brings in Andy Logan’s words, sung together by the rest of Ringlefinch; ‘Some day I'll return to lay my head and rest my bones in Coldwell Clough and the Bleaklow Stones.’ And Logan’s tale of home, identity and belonging is complete.
Ringlefinch’s Tall Tales reads like a series of plays, with a very human connection to the listener, its conclusion with Coldwell Clough is in truth a masterpiece within a masterpiece. The writing and production of Andy Logan and the band have created the perfect folk record worthy of the years of toil spent to bring it to completion.
Now, it’s my pleasure to hand over the reigns of the story to Ringlefinch bandmembers Andy Logan, Philip Briggs, and Nicole Teszke. We ask about the album’s development, the music videos, the story behind the artwork, Ringlefinch’s line-up, and the possibility of a Tall Tales Tour. All this and more below.
Ringlefinch. From left to right - Nicole Teszke, Philip Briggs, Arun Entwistle, William Rengifo, Graham Parrish, Andy Logan and Gillian Hunter-Gibbs. Image Credit: Liat Wicks.
1. Ringlefinch's debut album 'Tall Tales' was four years in the making. What was the song that kicked off the recording process?
Andy Logan: Looking back at my notes, we started with “Edward Gorey’s Gory Stories”. Part of the reason the process took four years is that we recorded and mixed everything ourselves, so there was a fair amount of trial-and-error! We decided early on that we wanted the freedom to experiment with Tall Tales, as it's our first full-length album - we absolutely loved the experience of working with Ben Walker on our first EP 'Mass Trespass', as he's both a hugely talented producer and a thoroughly lovely chap, but we were keen to be able to try things and not have to worry about paying for studio time if something didn't work out. All the cajon parts were recorded first in our rehearsal room, and most of the rest was done in Andy's home studio in Walthamstow. That side of things was pretty much "no budget"!
2. The album opens with 'Edward Gorey's Gory Stories'. When did you first experience the work of this author?
Andy: Unsurprisingly, that's a very vivid memory! Some twenty-odd years ago I was in a bookshop in Durham, looking for a present for a young relative, when I found a small book in the children's section called 'The Gashlycrumb Tinies', by a chap called Edward Gorey. That particular young relative liked comics and illustrations, so I picked the book up and started browsing. Let's just say there is no way in hell that 'The Gashlycrumb Tinies' should be in the children's section of a bookshop! It’s brilliantly drawn, extremely dark, hilariously macabre, and absolutely not for kids. That whole encounter was the seed of the song, which was one of the first we wrote as a band.
3. The music video looks like it was a lot of fun to make. What's everyone's favourite part of that video?
Philip Briggs: I would say I have several favourite parts which come under the heading of “Nicole’s killing spree”! I also like Emma’s drop of the mango she has just choked on. It took several takes to get it to rock “just so”.
Nicole Teszke: Getting to live out my murderous fantasies (just kidding!). My favourite vignette is probably Philip counting up all of the severed fingers, but Emma’s fatal encounter with a mango is a close second. It was so much fun to shoot, getting to do some creative brainstorming with the rest of the band, and having licence to be pretty off-the-wall.
Andy: Same - I love how enthusiastically homicidal we ended up making Nicole, almost entirely by accident. It helped us all see her in a new light! I also love the structure of the video. We were directly inspired by 'The Gashlycrumb Tinies' in making the video, both in how we used the same alphabetical rhyming couplets and in how the actual horrible events are always slightly out of shot. It was a real “I wonder if we could do that” sort of an idea, and I still can't believe we pulled it off. Our videographer for this one, Uli Kilian, is an absolute wizard and an all-round great chap - we literally couldn’t have done it without him.
4. The video for 'Making It' takes footage from the film of the same name. What made you want to explore this concept again with this single?
Andy: We first wrote “Making It” as the closing credits song for the film ‘Making It’, back in 2015. A friend of the band had mentioned they were directing a feature film, and asked if we’d be up for including some of our music on the soundtrack. One thing led to another, and I ended up actually writing and recording a large part of the background music for the film, which was totally unexpected and a great experience!
When it came to shooting the music video for the song, we managed to rope in both the film’s director Stephen Glover and its writer/lead actor Richard Crawley, who reprised his role as George, as well as our folk-scene friends Tom and Nina on camera duties. The idea behind the video was to explore some of the main themes from the film set in a dream sequence within the film’s universe, giving us the freedom to be a little more abstract and free-associative in the narrative - so in essence, the music video is something like an unofficial extra scene within the film’s story. It was great fun to do, and the video is riddled with surreal symbolism from the film. For example, in the film George is always eating bowls of steamed broccoli in a bid to stay healthy, which is why Philip and I are dressed up as broccoli and menacing him in the music video. We ultimately re-recorded the song for Tall Tales, as our line-up had changed since the soundtrack version, and we’re really happy with how it all turned out.
5. Tom Lehrer's 'Masochism Tango' is a wonderful addition to this album. What prompted Ringlefinch to take it on for this record?
Nicole: The song has been a regular part of our set for a while and is a real crowd-pleaser and fan favourite! It’s an absolute gem of a song, but I also love how we were able to give it the Ringlefinch treatment and make it our own.
Andy: Absolutely - it’s a great feeling to play what’s essentially a tango to a festival audience, and watch people really dancing up a storm to it! Thanks to my Dad I grew up on a strong diet of 50s, 60s and 70s comedy, and the glovebox in his car was always stuffed with cassettes that we’d listen to whenever we went anywhere - from the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band to Round The Horne to Bob Newhart to Hancock’s Half Hour to Derek & Clive. Tom Lehrer’s classic ‘An Evening Wasted’ was always one of my favourites, and I’ve many happy memories of us both singing along in the car to tunes like “Poisoning Pigeons In The Park”, “We Will All Go Together When We Go” and of course “The Masochism Tango”. On a little side note, to record a cover song you need to get permission from the copyright holder one way or another. Mr Lehrer still owns 100% of his publishing, so in this case it meant emailing the man himself to ask for his blessing! He sent a very kind and very supportive email back with his permission, which is absolutely my favourite email of all time and I’m planning to get it printed and framed.
6. 'Coldwell Clough' is an epic in eight parts - how did the writing of that come together? Were they all separate songs that were joined together?
Nicole: Unusually, “Coldwell Clough” had a nearly complete score already by the time Andy shared it with the rest of the band. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking it’s the best thing on the album. Even if you grew up in suburban Virginia (like I did) rather than rural Derbyshire, that sense of loss and longing for a ‘home’ that you can never get back is recognisable to a lot of us.
Andy: Oh wow, that’s a huge topic. “Coldwell Clough” was the last piece written for the album, and for me it’s probably the most deeply personal piece on there. It came out of a whole mess of ideas and emotions that had been bubbling around my head for a while. I grew up in the last terraced house on Kinder Scout, a mountain in England’s Peak District - turn left out of our front door and it was mostly just farms, the campsite, and mile upon mile of woods and moorland. That said, I’ve lived in London for twenty years now, so - although I still think of myself as a country boy at heart - that’s not been my life for a while at this point. “Coldwell Clough” came out of that minor identity crisis, and explores these questions of identity and home (and death and creativity, and others) structured around a hike over Kinder from Castleton to Hayfield. It’s also infused with the history and folklore of the area: from the steep Coffin Trail in Castleton, which for long years was the only way to get coffins from Edale to the nearest church miles away; to the collapsed roads of Mam Tor; to the Mermaid’s Pool on Kinder itself, where local legend says that if you look into it at sunrise on Easter Sunday you’ll see a mermaid who’ll grant you immortality; to the famous Mass Trespass of 1932, when a group of ramblers defied gamekeepers and the police to trespass across Kinder and in doing so laid the foundations for the right to roam across open land.
As Nicole says, “Coldwell Clough” is also unusual as we tend to work on arrangements together as a band - but when I brought this one in it was much more fully formed than most. I had a very clear idea of where I thought it was going, musically as well as lyrically and structurally. It was written as a continuous piece of music, with each part leading into the next, and some common musical themes and refrains that echo throughout (and also deliberately echo some of our other songs). “VII: Mass Trespass Part II” is the one exception, as it’s an extended version of the solo guitar piece “Mass Trespass” from our first EP of the same name. Arun wrote that piece at the end of the recording sessions for the EP, and over the years we’ve gradually built up the arrangement and written new sections. It became a new piece in a way, and I knew it would have a very natural place - both musically and thematically - at the heart of “Coldwell Clough”, so I wrote the pieces either side to dovetail around it.
Unsurprisingly, we’ve only played “Coldwell Clough” live in its entirety a handful of times. It has to be the right show - Saturday night on a festival stage might not work too well, for example! That said, it’s amazing to watch how people react when they think they’re listening to a regular stand-alone song, and then realise that something quite different is happening. I’ll always remember playing it at a show in Brighton, probably the second time we ever played it live. When we started the opening section it was quite a talky sort of crowd, I think there was a birthday party at the back of the pub - the opening ukulele notes were probably a bit swallowed by background noise. By the time we got to the end though, you could have heard a pin drop! Everybody in there was giving us 100% of their attention, it was absolutely magical. Probably my favourite moment of any gig we’ve played.
Overall, “Coldwell Clough” is by far the most ambitious piece I’ve written, and definitely one of the most satisfying. We actually had a long discussion as a band about whether we wanted to include it on the album, or release it later as a separate standalone EP. In the end, it just fit so well with the overall theme of the album that we knew we had to include it - and of course, ending our debut album with a 16 minute song cycle about home, death and hiking means the door is wide open for us to go wherever we want on album #2!
7. Andy, the artwork is taken from photography by your Dad, what made you decide to use these shots for 'Tall Tales'?
Andy: Mmm, that’s a great question, and it ties in with “Coldwell Clough” in a way. Where I grew up in the Peak District, that whole area was the heart of the industrial revolution and the countryside is dotted with the legacy of that heritage - abandoned factory ruins, unexpected bits of brickwork, odd structures and shapes in the landscape, and all of it thoroughly overgrown and reclaimed by nature. It’s no accident that the symbol for the Peak District is the millstone. I guess I’ve always been drawn to that slightly liminal sort of space (I have really strong childhood memories of me and my friends daring each other to run along the broken-down walls of some ancient flooded dye-vats deep in the woods at the bottom of our village); and I’ve always thought that there was a similar sort of tension and internal contrast in Ringlefinch’s music, with clear influences from various forms of traditional music filtered through a much more modern approach to songwriting and arrangement.
We were already considering the name Tall Tales for the album, as so many of the songs touched on the stories we tell ourselves about who we are (and the little self-deceptions implicit in that); and when I found that photo while flicking through some old family albums I was immediately struck by how well it spoke to both the songs on the album and also my own sense of identity. Plus it didn’t hurt that it looks like it could easily have been a Led Zep album cover!
The photo itself is of the demolition of a factory chimney in our village, taken in 1990 when Fred Dibnah (then Britain’s number one steeplejack) came to visit. The whole village turned out to watch, and I vividly remember standing there with Mum and Dad, aged 10 or so. Dad managed to capture the very moment the chimney came down - I’m still in awe at the framing of the picture and the sense of movement he captured. Funnily enough, after we shared the album cover on Instagram a few weeks ago we actually ended up connecting with Fred Dibnah’s son Roger, which is a lovely way of everything coming full circle.
8. The album lists Ringlefinch as being eight strong now, how did the line-up become what it is today?
Philip: The story begins in autumn 2012. I had known Andy for a few years through a mutual friend. When Andy discovered I played the mandolin he asked if I would like to join a band he was putting together. At my first session, the band consisted of Andy on banjo, ukulele and lead vocals, Ric on guitar and backing vocals, and another newbie, Miriam on backing vocals, with the intention that she would also play her clarinet at some point. Miriam stepped back after that session but I stayed on and soon we added Andy’s friend Chris on cajon and then Graham came in on bass, having played in a previous band with Andy. When Andy’s work colleague Rosie joined on viola I think that’s when we began to develop an increasing appetite for more and more strings in our sound!
Rosie and then Ric left in 2013 so we held auditions to fill their places, and that’s how we’ve enlisted new members ever since. We can tell pretty much right away when we’ve found the right person and this was true of Gillian on viola and Arun on guitar, two gifted musicians who became mainstays of Ringlefinch for many years to come and did a lot to help define our sound. While Gillian was on “maternity leave”, Anna came in on cello (previous credits include playing live with The Who!). Anna is another highly talented musician who helped shape the arrangements of several of our songs and played on our Christmas single (and larked around with the rest of us in the accompanying video).
Chris decided to call it a day at the end of 2014, followed by Anna the following year, so we held more auditions and were again lucky to find a couple more amazing musicians who gelled instantly with the band: William on cajon and Nicole on violin. When Gillian returned we now had a bigger string section which took our sound to a new level and I think really scaled up our ambitions of what the band could sound like. Eventually Gillian moved back to her native Canada, but happily we were approached by Emma, cellist in the brilliant Thickets who, like Ringlefinch, are part of the London folk scene centred around the Folkroom label. So with Emma in the band and Gillian having recorded her parts for many of the songs, that’s how we came to have an eight-piece band on the album. Plus a guest bassoonist on one song!
9. With physical copies of the album, you have a section for extra special thank you’s. Who are the Folkroom Rotating Orchestra?
Andy: When Ringlefinch first started playing live, we were incredibly lucky that the first people we approached were Stephen and Ben at Folkroom. As well as running the boutique label that’s putting out Tall Tales, they also run a fortnightly gig at The Harrison near Kings Cross (and now also in Brighton), which really became the heart of the alternative folk scene in London. We’ve played there many times, and became great friends with the many musicians we’d meet night after night - it’s absolutely the kind of night you could just decide to turn up to and be guaranteed to bump into people you know and also hear fantastic music you’d never otherwise have encountered.
In all honesty, much of the best music I’ve ever heard live has been at those shows. It’s a kind of modern London version of the Laurel Canyon scene, really - acts tour together, play on each other’s records, turn up en masse to support each other’s shows, go to each other’s weddings, all travel down together to play festivals on a big coach like a mad folky school trip, all that. I’ve never encountered anything like it in twenty years of playing live in London, and it’s bloody fantastic - when people say “grass roots music”, this is the very best expression of that.
The “Folkroom Rotating Orchestra” is the unofficial name for all the acts who are part of that scene, taken from the Facebook group we’re all part of. Some of the ones we know best and have played with most include (in no particular order, and with sincere apologies to those I’ve missed): Thickets, Salt Moon, Patch & The Giant, The Lost Cavalry, Forty Elephant Gang, Tom Hyatt, Andrew Butler, Sophie Jamieson, Kirsty Merryn, Kitty Macfarlane, Jack Harris, Emily Mae Winters, Oh Sister, Michael Garrett, Cameron Niven / Edgar Wallace Exchange, Winterfalle, Harry Harris, Andrea Kempson, Nick Edward Harris, Dan Duke, Joe Innes & The Cavalcade, Robin Elliott, Lazy Heart Parade, Sincere Deceivers, Worry Dolls, and of course Ben Walker!
10. With potential normality in sight, could Ringlefinch be taking 'Tall Tales' on tour?
Andy: God, I hope so. We’re desperate to play live again. It’s been a weirdly flattened experience, releasing an album we’re so proud of without being able to celebrate it at a launch gig, but we’re hoping we’ll be able to make up for that later in the year. We’ve got a couple of shows booked in for September (kicking off with the inaugural Brighton & Hove Folk Festival on 11th September - you heard it here first!), we’re just crossing all the digits that everything will be in a much better place by then.
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Purchase ‘Tall Tales’ and Ringlefinch’s earlier EPs on their Bandcamp page.
For more information about Ringlefinch including upcoming tour dates, visit their official website.
Follow Ringlefinch on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter @ringlefinchuk.
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