-- Traditional Folk Songs from the British Isles ---

We're extremely pleased to be releasing in a limited edition the new LP 'The Ale's What Cures Ye' by United Bible Studies. A compendium of traditional and modern folk songs as interpreted by the band and inspired by Folkways.

The record comes with a booklet of words by the band members and here are three extracts:

Black Sands - Titled after the Black Sands of 'Sweet Streams of Nancy' and pieced together from the relative geographies of melodies found elsewhere on the album, 'Blacksands' represents, to my mind, the band as a whole - waxing and waning between various members offerings and sewn together with a shared understanding of something more unified and ancient. Recorded in various parts of the English countryside and the Irish midlands.

The Dalesman's Litany/The Burning Sea - Dave brought the Litany to the table, and I was only faintly familiar with it from the Hart/Prior version. F.W. Moorman's paean to itinerant labouring hardships, the piece always conjured images of the families left behind in the search for pit work - A concept which lead to the creation of a kind of coda, The Burning Sea - with Alison Cotton's vocals from Ten Thousand Miles echoed here in an altogether different form...that of a distressed wife abandoned overseas, set against a scree of gradually deconstructed/decaying viola lines.

The Recruited Collier - Many's the tip Johnny Moynihan offered me regarding the songs I was singing whilst touring with him one Summer. Singing 'The Recruited Collier' exactly as Anne Briggs had done was one of them. However, on this recording, Nature intervened. The tide was fast approaching & in our haste, I sang 'take my heart' rather than 'break my heart'. Not only that, but I sang it twice, perhaps recalling Pavement's advice to repeat any mistakes you made so as to make them seem deliberate. With no room for second takes, we made good our escape from the smugglers cave & I swore to never haul a harmonium up & down a cliff face ever again.

United Bible Studies in The Ale's What Cures Ye are:

David Colohan (Raising Holy Sparks)
Michael Tanner (Plinth)
Aine O'Dwyer
Nicholas Palmer
Alison Cotton
Richard Moult
Louise McGrath
Sharron Kraus

Mixed by Michael Tanner
Mastered by Patrick Klem
Sleeve by Lucy Duncombe

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