Rough Trade Records HQ on a late autumn afternoon. The new Sleaford Mods album hollers above the desks and CD shelves. Libertines-branded bags slump against piles of new vinyl. The duo who are among the label’s newer signings sit on a sofa in the middle of the chaos, reflecting on the minor controversy they have caused.
“Most of the people complaining about us,” says Josienne Clarke, fresh from some tea and cake, “are sixtysomething men with beards called Brian.”
“One of them emailed me to complain about a gig we’d just done when I was in a taxi on my way home from it,” adds her bearded bandmate Ben Walker. Together, Clarke and Walker, both 34, are one of Britain’s biggest folk acts, with five albums of beautifully textured, twilit songs, many years of treading the dusty boards of folk sessions and festivals, and a coveted Radio 2 folk award for best duo between them.
When they won the Radio 2 award, they had to play live in front of 1,500 people, and be filmed. “If you fuck that up, that is going to be on the internet forever,” Clarke says, with a grimace. “And it was brilliant, obviously, to win, but at the same time, we were: Argh! Does this mean that we just have to do this now?’”
But they’ve since branched out and the proverbial’s hit the fan. “We’d played with a chamber orchestra,” Walker explains, with an existential look of despair on his face. “It had been an absolute arse-ache to organise, and this bloke said he was ‘sorely disappointed’ because we’d done something that ‘wasn’t expected’.”
Clarke is a similarly spirited grump on this subject, blue-varnished fingernails itching at her scarf with irritation. “Yes, we could make an album for him, with just the two us and a guitar, and it’d be a real money-spinner. But is it really wrong to want to do something new?”
This is the story of a duo who accidentally fell into folk, or rather the story of “two comprehensive school noobs who turned up in this world which lots of people are born into … trying to make it look like this hadn’t been a terrible mistake.” Clarke loved singing from childhood, she says, but her parents weren’t musical at all (“they were encouraging, but had no fucking idea how to help me”). Her low, elegant voice was noted by her teachers and she started training as a classical performer, before dropping out of a music degree. “I’d only started reading music at 15, and couldn’t really sight-read, so I could barely study anything.” She shrugs. “But I wanted to sing.”
Instead, Clarke focused on other singers she liked, including Sandy Denny and Joan Baez, and sang traditional songs they had popularised; her 2010 solo record, One Light Is Gone, saw her getting reviews on folk blogs as a result. “But folk was a term that was applied to me rather than me actually actively going out and seeking it. Plus people forget Sandy Denny was as much a songwriter as she was an interpreter.”
Original songs have been part of Clarke and Walker’s arsenal since day one, and their latest album, Overnight, includes seven of them: beautifully drawn miniatures full of a melancholy reminiscent of early-70s singer-songwriters. Clarke writes the songs, “the squishy, lyrical stuff”, while Walker’s the arranger and planner: “I’m totally bubble-chart and he’s spreadsheet.”
Walker was in an indie band when he and Clarke met. He loved Dire Straits as a child and Interpol as a teenager, and still obsesses over the electronica of Warp Records and Jon Hopkins. They became a duo in 2011, releasing a collection of traditional songs, The Seas Are Deep, a tool to make more people listen to them, more than anything else, they confess. It was released by the folk label Navigator Records – and, Clarke says: “That was it. We were officially folk.” Invitations flooded in for them to play traditional sessions and festivals, which taught them a lot. “To share folk songs that you really love with people who were there when they were being played the first time round is amazing,” she says.
“But it felt like that Big Train sketch about Ralph McTell, where all the audience are screaming for Streets of London,” Walker adds. “We were desperate to do other things.”
A wider audience has been gradually assembling, including celebrity fans: take the man who approached Walker at the 2015 Shirley Collins birthday gig at London’s Cecil Sharp House. “This bloke from Wolverhampton went: ‘Hello, I’m Robert, I thought you were great.’ ‘We know who you are, Mr Plant!’” Then another, untypical character started attending their gigs, a quiet fellow who’d launched the careers of the Smiths and the Strokes. When they found out it was Geoff Travis, they were delighted; his label had been on their wish list. “What makes Rough Trade so good is that they just do what they want,” Walker says, “and let the music go where it goes.” People forget the other similar records they’ve put out, too, Clarke adds, by the Unthanks, Sufjan Stevens and Alasdair Roberts.
For Overnight, the pair went to Rockfield Studios to expand their sound further, and the mix of styles on the record is well served by the rich, winter-lit production. Gillian Welch’s Dark Turn of Mind sits next to a stunning version of folk standard Weep You No More Sad Fountains, that will definitely satisfy the Brians, and a space-pop, bossa nova-flavoured single called The Waning Crescent, that might not.
But Clarke and Walker know that a warmer, more traditional sound will always be part of their world. “I make this joke on stage now about how when a few people heard about Rough Trade, they were like: ‘Guys, er, isn’t that a punk label?’” Clarke laughs. “And I say Ben and I are so punk that we’ve gone full circle. We don’t even have to be irreverent. We’re corduroy-wearing punks!” Surely, even the Brians should be happy with that.
- Overnight is out now on Rough Trade Records
