Megson – Take Yourself A Wife
While acoustic folk pioneers Megson continue to raise their profile by picking up rave reviews at festivals and venues across the UK, their recorded albums are equally as accomplished, and ‘Take Yourself a Wife’ marks the third release in their trio of excellent albums.
Where ‘Smoke of Home’ had subtle links to their native North-East, this album has 300 years of North-Eastern history as its heart and soul; it’s a collection of songs that chronicle the life and times of real people and communities, and they were all written by residents of Teeside, Tyneside, County Durham and Northumberland.
While the songs cover a broad time-scale, none of them ever feel traditional – the writers of all the songs are known, and just this small piece of information rather than a ‘trad. arr’ tag helps put the songs into context, from the light-hearted almost comical ‘Take Yourself a Wife’, through to the protest song ‘The New Fish Market’ these are songs that reflect real people and their everyday lives.
Although only a few years into their career, Megson already have a distinctive feel to their sound, their bright, fresh recordings with the driving, rhythmic mandola and guitar of Stu Hanna, and beautifully clean vocals from Debbie Hanna-Palmer make them instantly identifiable. It’s a sound they continue to build on by adding a small but well chosen range of instrumentation to the mix, including fiddle, bass, mandolin and concertina; add to this the songs where Stu takes the lead and the pieces they share, and they turn a simple duo into a varied and accomplished acoustic band sound.
Stu’s skill as a producer has not gone unnoticed in the folk industry either, and his ability to create a fresh, contemporary sound with traditional instrumentation has been recognised with production credits for the recent albums by Benji Kirkpartick, Jon Redfern, Faustus and Mawkin:Causley.
This sound is best showcased on ‘Little Joe’ written by Joe Wilson, a well known nineteenth Century writer, where the fantastic arrangement and production make a 150 year old song sound like it was meant to be arranged the way Megson present it. In truth, that’s the strength of the whole album, the songs may have been written many years ago, but the issues, emotions and characters that populate the lyrics still have resonance today; put this together with a contemporary musical approach and it makes the disc a compelling and attractive collection.
As an album so proudly and firmly rooted in the North-East, you’d expect a few songs relating to the pits and mines of the area, and the two they’ve chosen are both evocative and graphic depictions daily life, ‘Fourpence a Day’ feels like an authentic industrial folksong of the time chronicling work and conditions; whereas ‘The Oakey Strike Evictions’ vividly paints a picture of the ‘Candymen’, the dockers who were recruited as bailiffs and brought in to evict striking miners.
Other songs touch on the wrench of emigration (‘O Mary Will You Go’), the execution of a street vendor for the murder of her mother (‘Jane Jamieson’s Ghost’) through to the final track ‘Sandgate Lassie’s Lament’, a song covers the loss of a young man press ganged into service in the Navy – it’s a tender song that is beautifully sung by Debbie, and a fitting end to an exceptional collection.
‘Take Yourself a Wife’ is a confident and brave album, and even if the concept of it may feel a little odd for a contemporary young duo, the execution of it makes perfect sense; the result is a mature and expressive album full of songs that still have stories to tell many years after they were written.
