Interview with Pavey Ark: ‘The strings are like the magic fairy dust, especially live’

Fast-rising alternative folk band from Hull, Pavey Ark, is working on their second full-length album, which will include an upbeat song about lockdown, ‘Your Sweet Time’.

While the band’s line-up can fluctuate slightly, the most consistent one comprises Neil Thomas (vocals, songwriter and guitar), Vicky Berry (violin), Chris Heron (violin and he also composes most of the parts for strings), John Hamilton (bass guitar and lead guitar), Sam Handley (drums), Alex Simpson (violin, he also composed strings on a couple of album tracks) and Beth Nicholson (cello on album and plays the larger gigs with them). Paula Bowes also played the viola on their last album and sometimes plays with them live. Their name references the fell of the same name in the Lake District: ‘I used to do a bit of walking there,’ Thomas said. ‘I tried to find out where the name came from, it intrigued me. I thought, it’s a good name, I’ll have it!’

Thomas actually started out as a solo singer before meeting Hamilton at music nights in Hull a few years ago. Thomas’ father-in-law plays in a cover band and Thomas approached their stand in drummer to play with them. After having a student string quartet play at his wedding, Thomas contacted the music department at the university to see if any violinists might be interested in playing with them. They first performed live for BBC Introducing in February 2016, before going on to play Glastonbury just four months later.

‘I was buzzing,’ he said. ‘The strings are like the magic fairy dust, especially live. ‘

Pavey Ark’s last album, Close Your Eyes and Think of Nothing, was released on 20 March, just before lockdown (They are currently selling a limited edition of clear vinyl and black vinyl records at www.paveyark.co.uk.). ‘There was nothing we could do,’ Thomas said. ‘Some people had already approached us for PR, so we couldn’t even delay it. On social media, everything was about COVID, it was hard to be heard above the noise. When this thing does finish, every artist on the planet will release something, won’t they? It will be equally hard to get heard.’

‘Once we started playing with the strings, I knew how I wanted it to sound’

I tell him how beautiful and distinctive the album is and how the strings really give the songs an edge. ‘Yeah, once we started playing with the strings, I knew how I wanted it to sound. I had the sound in my head but it was hard to get it out! I wanted it to be less folk sounding and more orchestral.’

He certainly achieved that objective. His haunting vocals, paired with the strings, gorgeous finger-picked guitar, melodic bass lines and complex percussion, give the songs a somewhat ethereal quality. I tell him that my favourite song on the album is ‘Cuckoo’ because I find it completely mesmerizing. ‘That’s one of the more recent ones, I played it with Sam and Johnny and I knew it was going to be the best one. It’s upbeat and melodic, the drums and bass make it what it is.’

The idea for ‘Cuckoo’ actually came to him in a dream just after Trump was elected in 2016. ‘In my dream, I was floating over a map of the US looking down on a lake and a place called Cuckoo’, he laughed. ‘It was 4 in the morning, I got out of bed, got my guitar and started composing it, I started to hum where the lyrics would be. I’m the same when I’m out and about, I’ll hum into my phone if a melody pops into my head, before I lose it.’

Essentially, the song is about meeting someone on the same wavelength as you, who can see you for what you really are and with whom you share a longing to escape and leave the city behind. As the track kicks off: ‘The future paints a crooked smile, the colour painted thick to hide the process. The truth is drying quick behind the rushed strokes and the scribbled line of progress.’

‘It’s about a yearning to turn your brain off’

The eponymous title track deals with the difficulty of switching your brain off, Thomas said. ‘It’s about a yearning to turn your brain off,’ he said. ‘Even with meditation, if you try to think about nothing, it’s almost impossible to switch off. The song is half about a break up as well.’

The desire to switch off comes through strongly in the lyrics: ‘If I could just fold my mind and check the reasons from behind then I might see clean behind these lost chances.’

‘Jenny Let Go’, another track on the album, was written for his wife after they went travelling around the world: ‘I was away travelling with my girlfriend Jenny who is now my wife, we had a round the world ticket. We went to Fiji, there was a cyclone coming in and half the island was flooded. Luckily, it veered off and at the back end of it, we went to a little island that was quite stripped back, we were the only guests there. In the evening, the staff got out their guitars and ukeleles and we’d all hang out. The subject of the song is that my wife took time off from teaching to go travelling. She was doing a 70 hour week and the song was about wanting to go back there.’

The song hints at an earthly paradise: ‘It’s where our thoughts hang recently, under distant bat-filled trees, stuff a bottle with our dreams, they all look tangible to me.’

‘I wanted it to be a bit more experimental. It won’t be Portishead but there are lots of changes in some of the songs’

Pavey Ark is working on their next album and Thomas says he’s got all the songs written – ‘probably too many’, he laughed. His favourite song on it is ‘Your Sweet Time’, a lockdown track with a difference, one that actually extols the benefits of it. ‘We recorded some demo drums just before the second lockdown, it’s quite upbeat,’ he said. ‘We might put some horns on there. I think it’s one of the best ones I’ve written. I wrote it quite early in lockdown and it was doom and gloom but suddenly we had this beautiful weather and a switch flicked. I had so much time to appreciate things.’

However, the next album will contain some surprises: ‘I wanted it to be a bit more experimental. It won’t be Portishead [laughs] but there are lots of changes in some of the songs, they have four parts to them and some weird, psychedelic violin! I like the idea of orchestral but stripped back, so I might try to do that on some songs but have a completely lush string quartet on others.’

Many of their songs released so far have huge echoes of folk singer Nick Drake, including their debut single (2017), ‘Leaf by Leaf’, and I ask him if Drake has been a big influence and he gets very animated: ‘I absolutely love Nick Drake and he’s one of Johnny’s favourites. He’s a great example of someone writing songs that were melancholy but so beautiful. For some people, it’s too much, they can’t listen to it. I love ‘Northern Sky’, it’s so uplifting and I love the strings on ‘Riverman’ and ‘Day Is Done’.’

Next year, lockdown permitting, they will be playing Moseley Folk Festival, Boomtown Fair, Deer Shed and an intimate headline show at the Green Note (London). They will also be supporting This Is The Kit at the York Citadel Church next November.

He cites Radiohead as a band who have consistently been one of his favourites over the years. ‘I pull towards melancholy,’ he laughed. ‘I love ‘Heaven’ by The Walkmen (an American indie rock band) and ‘The Red Moon’, one of their later songs, has beautiful piano and melancholy.’

By his own admission, he’s become ‘obsessed’ in the past week with Andrew Bird’s album ‘My Finest Work Yet’ (2019). The album marks the first overtly political release from the American Grammy nominated indie rock, multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter. ‘I heard it for the first time last week, it’s been on a loop!’ Locally, he’s a fan of folk artists Katie Spencer and Crooked Weather and blues/folk/pop band The Quicksilver Kings.

If he could tour with anyone, he goes with Radiohead: ‘I’ve loved them for years. We’d probably have a helicopter landing pad, wouldn’t we? If I can pick someone dead then John Lennon because he was an absolute genius.’

(Photo from left to right: Vicki, Chris, Johnny, Sam, Neil, Alex and Beth)