If you were to condense everything that was most quintessentially English about quintessential Englishness — from the green man and morris dancing to Vaughan Williams and The Whitsun Weddings — feed it into a liquidiser, have it remixed by an electronica DJ, and then transformed into the soundtrack of some trendy arthouse film premièred at a festival in Brighton, what you might end up with is something like the work of Grasscut.
I hope that doesn’t sound offputting. It’s quite possible that I’ve completely misrepresented them. For a more accurate assessment, I did try asking one of their two members Marcus O’Dair — who spends his spare time as a music journalist. But sadly he was none the wiser: ‘We’ve been compared to all sorts of Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and Nineties bands, including lots I haven’t heard of. I’m a bit too close to it, to be honest, to form an opinion.’
When pushed, however, O’Dair says that the comparisons that seem to crop up most are Seventies Eno, Robert Wyatt and Gavin Bryars — especially Bryars’s 1971 composition ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’, in which a loop of an unknown homeless man singing a brief stanza of a religious song is gradually overlaid with harmonies of string and brass to form 25 minutes’ worth of sad, touching and very moving minimalism.
They perform a similar trick on their first album with a scratchy old recording of an elderly man — Hilaire Belloc, in fact — singing in a high, quavery, fruity voice a strange poem called ‘The Winged Horse’. This then merges with what might be a wheezy melodeon and more declaimed poetry to create — well, I’m not sure what exactly, but it’s all rather poignant and elegiac and redolent, perhaps, of that feeling you might get watching a Powell and Pressburger film on a damp autumn Sunday afternoon.
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