Brown Wimpenny have released their debut album Long Live Brown Wimpenny, out now via Broadside Hacks Recordings on double vinyl, CD and digital.
The collective, split between Manchester, Liverpool and London, takes its name from a distant 19th-century relative of tenor banjoist Seth Lockwood. It began as informal Sunday jam sessions in Lockwood’s Manchester living room, growing as large as 25 members before settling at its current number of eleven. Early shows saw the band fill half the room’s capacity themselves, with lyrics passed to the audience as a deliberate reduction of the distance between performer and crowd.
Long Live Brown Wimpenny is a double album spanning eight tracks, several of which are extended medleys: the album opens with a fourteen-minute suite combining ‘Gaslight’, ‘Seanhamac Tube Station’, ‘The Sailor’s Wife’ and ‘Lovely Bann Water’, and a later track runs to over sixteen minutes. The material draws on industrial North of England song traditions alongside Irish folk and Scottish reels, bringing together hardened shepherdesses, steelworkers, lonely drunks and sailors approaching death in a collection that feels, as KLOF Magazine put it, both iconoclastic and deeply rooted.
The album’s most striking moment may be ‘Old Molly Metcalfe’, a Jake Thackray song about the life of a North Yorkshire shepherdess. Brown Wimpenny’s version opens with a live archive recording of Thackray himself performing the song at a Cardiff show in 1974, provided to the band by his estate. Previous singles ‘Raglan Road’ and ‘The Sheffield Grinder’ earned support from The Quietus, Clash and BBC Radio 2’s Folk Show.
Brown Wimpenny play London’s Moth Club on 12th June, with further dates at Lancashire’s Seek Out Festival on 25th July and Future Yard in Birkenhead on 26th July.
