Edinburgh group give bluegrass a modern twist

Southern Tenant Folk Union, an outfit who put a winning twist on bluegrass, will play The Crane on Thursday next, February 14.  

The Edinburgh based seven-piece band released their fifth album Hello Cold Goodbye Sun last month. They recently got a valuable promotional boost here in Ireland when they played on The Late Late Show.

“It went really well, I think,” says Pat McGarvey, who sings and plays five-string banjo. “They’ve got a very good camera crew; they do it week in, week out. They made us look very good! Also, they let us do our regular show, which is around one mic. I hope it helps, frankly, in the commercial sense. I want more people to see us and I want us to pay off our debts.”

Despite their traditional sounding name, Southern Tenant Folk Union like to put a modern spin on rootsy music. Listening to soundtracks of old Italian movies inspired Pat to make his banjo sound like a synthesiser on the song Crash.

“I felt it was something that hadn’t been done,” he says. “There are so many bands who do really great, straight-ahead bluegrass. That market place is crowded. It’s important to see what you can do with the instruments; they’re not just limited to songs about trains.

“Having said that, I love a straight bluegrass band. In our live show, we do a hell of a lot of straight bluegrass. That stuff’s exciting to see live. I think 90 minutes of slow, doomy music wouldn’t work.”

To replicate the synthesiser sound, Pat muffled his banjo with a tea-towel. What brought this unusual technique about?

“Because I’ve got two small kids,” he laughs. “We’ve just moved flat, but the place we were in before was a one-bedroom flat. To keep the banjo quiet when I was practising I was using a tea towel. I discovered it made a much more percussive sound; it actually does sound a bit like a synthesiser.”

The song Chest Freezer is set in a post-apocalyptic world, a theme that sci-fi and horror fans Southern Tenant Folk Union have explored on previous albums.

“The band’s been plying our post-apocalyptic lyrical themes for a few years now!” Pat says. “There was a tune our old fiddle player Roddie Nielsen wrote. I thought it was too good to be a fiddle tune, so I wrote lyrics to it.

“I thought in some post-apocalyptic, agrarian future where there’s less electricity around, perhaps the future will be acoustic music. So I ended up writing this song The New Farming Scene, talking about what it would be like in a future where there are small miniature farm states that control food and resources.”

Pat is a fan of Frank Herbert, who wrote the acclaimed Dune series of sci-fi books. Crash takes its name from a novel by English writer JG Ballard.

“He describes car crashes in great detail, and I thought that would be a good mix on how the economy crashed. JG Ballard also wrote a book called The Drowned World, about water levels rising and people trying to survive in a much hotter climate.

“On the new album, I suggested keeping the theme on modern horror,” Pats adds. “Things that people find frightening in their daily lives, like losing their jobs or big business destroying the economy. A fear of the future not going the way we would like it to.”

Southern Tenant Folk Union have an intriguing take on the folk and rootsy tradition. It must take some work – where do they practise?“We usually rehearse at either Jed’s [Milroy, clarinet/guitar/banjo] or Chris’s [Purcell, vocals/guitar] house,” says Pat.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.