Interview with Wilswood Buoys: ‘It’s nice to have a “book”, an album that takes you on a journey’

Wilswood Buoys, an alt-folk duo from Mersea Island in Essex, have just released their debut album A New Beginning, replete with catchy choruses, charting love, loss and the state of the world.

The duo comprises Josh Wilson and Joe Sherwood, their name taken from putting part of their surnames together and referencing the fact that Mersea Island lies between the estuaries of the Blackwater and Colne rivers. They formed in summer 2017, starting out as just a couple of friends having a jam before they turned their hand to writing music. ‘We don’t really know what our genre is,’ Wilson said. ‘We don’t set out with a style of songs, we could write something different, it depends on what we like in the moment.’

Nonetheless, A New Beginning is a beautiful, story-driven album: ‘I feel like a lot of albums are just track after track these days but I think it’s nice to have a “book”, an album that takes you on a journey,’ Wilson said. ‘The album is a rollercoaster of emotions.’ Sherwood agrees: ‘It’s got heavier and also lighter stuff.’

‘It’s a powerful song, it opens the album up’

It does. ‘Scars’, the opener, is almost hymnal, with some brilliant harmonica playing from Sherwood and turns out to have a very poignant backstory: ‘It’s an important story to both of us,’ Wilson said. ‘A friend wrote a poem for her dad who died of cancer, he was only 50. I thought it was a really nice poem. I had my guitar at the time and started taking a few lines from the poem. When we first finished it, I sent it to her and she said she and her mum were listening to it in the kitchen, sobbing. The song’s not just for her, it can be for anyone who’s been through something similar. It’s a powerful song, it opens the album up.’

The album has some powerful backing, having been produced and mastered by punk maestro turned folk legend, Frank Turner. Wilson first encountered Turner in his day job as an oysterman on Mersea Island. Sherwood met him in one of the most serendipitous of ways: ‘I work with my dad as a carpenter,’ he said. ‘We went round to this house one day to replace some rotten wood and Frank opened the door! At first I was speechless (laughs) but eventually I told him that I was in a band, I told him what we did, and he said he’d listen to our stuff. He was really nice, he said we could use the studio in his garden.’

Turner also sings on ‘A Place To Call My Own’ on the album, a track that has all the hallmarks of one of his own songs with its catchy, big, singalong chorus and slightly punky folk vibe, yet, remarkably, was written by Wilson and Sherwood before they even met him: ‘This was all happening in and out of lockdown,’ Wilson said. ‘It worked well as Frank had some free time. And I thought I’d ask if he fancied doing a bit of singing on one of our songs (laughs). He said “What song?” I said he could pick and he chose that one. The bit where he sings, like an echo of what we’re singing, that was originally going to be instrumental, a horn section.’

‘We’re pretty relaxed about writing, we don’t force a song’

Songwriting can vary enormously from song to song, according to Sherwood: ‘Josh might write the whole song and I might put a melody to it or it might be the other way round,’ he said. ‘We’re pretty relaxed about writing, we don’t force a song.’ Wilson agrees: ‘It’s always a surprise, you’re always getting down lyrics or you’ll have a riff on the guitar,’ he said.

‘Rollercoaster’ is a particularly striking track on the album, with both guitars working as a seamless echo of each other going back and forth. The Spanish sounding guitars contrast brilliantly with the more introspective yet recalcitrant lyrics about being a prisoner of your own mind: ‘It’s about the anxiety rollercoaster that everybody rides,’ Wilson said. ‘You think you’ve got there but you haven’t, that’s where the reference to “never getting to the top” – the best bit – comes from. Lockdown happened when it was our first year of getting ready for gigs. We had a wall planner with all the gigs on it, we had to rip it off the wall. In lockdown, you felt so trapped and uncertain.’

Turner ordered the tracks on the album and the flow is clear: ‘When you listen to the album, every other song is full band, then there’s an acoustic one,’ Wilson said. ‘It mixes it up. I feel that’s our charm, that’s what people get live – two guys on a guitar.’

One of the most upbeat songs on the album is ‘Change’, which makes you want to get up on your feet, as the hooky, folky riff pulls it along: ‘We always describe it as about Josh’s love life (laughs),’ said Sherwood. Wilson is laughing: ‘I was in a long-distance relationship with a girl for a few years,’ he said. ‘It was never going to come to anything. It’s a bit poppy, isn’t it? It’s quite jolly.’ It is, around three minutes in, the riffs become faster and more frenzied, as it morphs from being a folk song into more of an indie anthem. Other tracks, such as ‘Must Be Love’ combine what Sherwood calls ‘rappy bits’ with a punky edge: ‘I’m doing those,’ he said, looking genuinely delighted.

‘I always felt like a lot of people hate metal music but I always listened to it for the choruses’

Music runs in both their families: ‘I was brought up on folk music,’ Sherwood said. ‘My dad was in folk bands and played blues roots, he plays the mandolin and guitar. We listened to a lot of The Waterboys, The Levellers, James Taylor, Neil Young and Cat Stevens.’ Wilswood Buoys are currently touring with Frank Turner and will be supporting The Levellers next, so I say this must delight Sherwood’s dad: ‘My dad supported The Levellers a few years ago as well!’

Wilson brings very different influences to the band: ‘I feel that Joe’s side is folk and I bring the alternative side,’ he said. ‘I love every genre of music from rock to metal. One of my favourite bands of all time is Enter Shikari, I love Metallica and System of a Down (an Armenian-American heavy metal band from Glendale, California). Everyone loves Foo Fighters. I always felt like a lot of people hate metal music but I always listened to it for the choruses and thought I’d love to hear them singing them acoustically. If something tickles the sound senses, i’m all over it! That’s why Joe and I work really well together, in ways you wouldn’t expect.’

Interestingly, neither of them got into playing music until their mid-teens: ‘My dad bought me a guitar when I was six because he was in a band and stuff, he pushed me into it (laughs),’ Wilson said. ‘I never really took to it until my last years of secondary school and then when I fell in love with it, I was about 15 or 16.’ It was a similar trajectory for Sherwood: ‘My dad played in a few bands over the years but, like Josh, I didn’t start learning properly until about the same age. When I started writing songs, it opened up a whole new world.’

‘It’s almost like an explosion in the chant’

Picking a favourite song on the album is hard for both of them: ”Place’ was my favourite but I really like listening to ‘Home’, Sherwood said. Wilson picks ‘More And More’: ‘I absolutely love it, the message (about greed, destruction and poverty in society), they’re all Joe’s lyrics. It sums us up. It’s a statement, you don’t always have to shout to make a statement, do you? It’s almost like an explosion in the chant “We want more and more”.’ Wilson agrees: ‘It’s one of the songs that needs more credit, people might not make it through to the end of the album but it’s the perfect place for it to be.’

The “more and more” part, backed by strings, is incredibly powerful, a swelling of voices that sounds as if a whole crowd of people are singing it: ‘It’s me and Joe, our dad, Frank, his wife and the sound guy, we all stood around one mic and sung it,’ Wilson said. ‘We sang it a lot of different ways, Frank would say things like “Do it like a football chant!” (laughs). It’s like you’d want people to sing it at our gigs if they ever got to know us. It’s almost replicating that human life out of control-ness.’ Turner also gave them them some useful advice, according to Wilson: ‘Best advice Frank has given us is just to keep gigging and keep playing as much as possible wherever and whenever – we can never say no to any gig.’

If they could go for a drink with anyone, Wilson picks Raul Reynolds from Enter Shikari: ‘I’d like to hang out with him and the band and see how they hang out!’ Sherwood picks Neil Young: ‘I’ve loved his music for years. I wouldn’t know what to say to him, I’d sit there in awe!’