dan haywood

Gorgeously idyllic slice of forest folk foraging to be had on Dan Haywood’s intimately cradled ‘dapple’ via southern bird. Now we mentioned this a few weeks back with the parting promise that we would give a account of its loveliness in more details at a later time. Well that later time has arrived though admittedly a lot later than we originally intended given the fact that the CD decided to make a nest for itself under a stack of CD’s whereby it hid itself in a hibernatory cocoon. Well that’s our story and one that we’re sticking with. Recorded on location deep in the forest of Bowland, Haywood and his like minded band of merry men and woman set up camp and with tape machines set at record to capture the beauty, the grace and the simplicity of an age faraway from the maddening hustle n’ bustle of modernity and quietly reclined in a secret corner hidden amid the lush green lowlands of an English village preserve. In essence ‘Dapple’ is a love note to the rural countryside, each of these ten trembled treats are sweetly sprayed in a rustic lilt charmed by chirping birdsong, the assembled throng of chaffinches, blackbirds, wrens, woodpeckers and robins as much a part of storytelling symphony as its listed and noteworthy minstrels. Amid these gathered musical posies Haywood and co whittle out by way of a handcraft so rarefied an ornate 25 minute story telling bouquet dimpled in a frail and fragile tapestry of an ancestral musical weave. Amid the grooves simple tales of simple folk spirited away to translate at times like a dreamily envisaged version of spring watch presented by a less bawdy Rambling Sid Rumpo all dappled in village hymnals and signed in the sighing pageantry of village fete canters as on for example ‘floral dance’. somewhere else the understated and faintly drawn whisper of the forlorn ‘lapping wave’ bitter sweetly sails clutching yearn fully upon passing drift wood while best of the set is the fog bound murmur of ‘suspicious farms’ hoisted it is upon the same darkly dinked ballade ring as that found on platters borne of the name Lupen Crook and the murder birds.