Review: Hayden Thorpe & Propellor Ensemble, Bristol Beacon – ‘An extraordinary journey’

Well, you can’t say that we weren’t warned.

Just before he starts, Hayden Thorpe (ex-Wild Beasts frontman) clasps and unclasps his hands, as if a nervous evangelist, and tells us that we’re going to be taken somewhere else. Somewhere that’s nature filled and haunted by brutality, somewhere that’s desolate but full of wild beauty, somewhere that will only let us go “when it’s finished with us”.

The place that Thorpe, and five parts of Propellor Ensemble, are set to take us is Orford Ness, a former nuclear testing site on the Suffolk coast.

For his third solo album he was inspired by Robert MacFarlane and Stanley Donwood’s 2019 book Ness and tonight he leads us through the album song by song, page by page until we are wrung out and, more than, faintly unsettled.

 

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Starting with a passage quoted from the book, the scene is expertly set. There’s darkness and poetry, a juxtaposition of looming weaponry and coils of vegetation in Merman, then an eerie heartbeat-drumbeat disturbs the contemplation.

Delia Stevens has control of a huge bass drum which she sprawls upon, beating, hammering, stroking, coaxing breath and life from. She brings this imagined place to life. And it’s a scary place.

As Jack McNeill’s sea-moan sax swirls around at ground level Thorpe’s intense, high voice sets up repetitions from MacFarlane’s words. Images are snatched at then banished only to be returned to later. Layers of sound, voices, percussion all carefully build the strata of Ness.

Much of the narrative of Ness is about this intricate building of an atmosphere. WTF Is That? is all chants and repetitions, a Greek chorus of voices proclaiming from one side of the stage. On Gull, Thorpe takes a violin bow to his guitar as it skitters and howls, McNeill’s clarinet ascending through the clouds meeting the birds intoned by the three-piece female choir behind him.

There are sharp, chopped handclaps on In the Green Chapel and the sound of a raging apocalypse on Song of the Bomb. Thorpe and his Ensemble take the pastoral loveliness of Talk Talk and push it into the shadows, into the sea-mists.

In amongst all of this world building there are three songs that stick out like islets. He is a perfect alt-pop song, filled with percussive crashes and Thorpe’s glorious voice while She is coated with lichen and moss, lovely and nature furred. Stevens’ slo-mo percussion sits next to Thorpe’s brittle guitar and McNeill’s clarinet, adding depth to the landscape.

They burbles and babbles, yet another part of the natural world seeping through the cracks. There’s fluidity and soulful harmonies, the motion of waves lapping at a deserted pebbled beach.

Ness gives up its audience reluctantly. More repetitions and echoes, more gentle rain and ghostly harmonies remind us that so much of the man-made destruction is “nothing-ness”. Finally, Thorpe twinkles at a piano for Closer Away and then strips the whole thing away so that just the voices are left. The thought that “it was all sea once” is almost comforting. Almost.

Once the Ness spell has been broken Thorpe re-settles himself at the piano for a tumble through selected highlights of his back catalogue. Diviner, Love Crimes and Lion’s Share are sophisticated, literate pop with Thorpe’s voice carrying the best of Antony/ANOHNI and the Johnsons.

They are the perfect air-lock to help us recover from an extraordinary journey.

All images: Gavin McNamara

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