Together with Vashti Bunyan’s Simply One other Diamond Day and Comus’s First Utterance, Swaddling Songs by Mellow Candle was a kind of misplaced, cult LPs whose gradual rediscovery helped to spark a renewed curiosity within the British and Irish psychedelic people, round 25 years in the past. Whereas its potion of meadows, fantasy and magic nonetheless presses loads of the best folk-rock buttons at this time, the band prevented too many overt Celtic tinges. It’s an album that may come out swinging capably arduous in addition to veiling itself with the odd dusky ballad. Anybody accustomed to albums by Sandy Denny, Fotheringay and John & Beverley Martyn from the identical period will discover themselves on secure floor in its 12 tracks.

1971, when most of those songs had been written, is the zenith of this bulge in people music, the 12 months when among the finest music was made within the British Isles, but additionally when the glut started to pile up and wither in a declining financial system. Most of the bands you would possibly affiliate with the pagan pastoralia of Mellow Candle – Comus, Timber, Forest, The Woods Band, Spirogyra, Heron and others – got here and went on the identical time with few albums left among the many mulch.

The title, Swaddling Songs, guarantees a music to wrap your self in. Or maybe it was a music that the 2 girls on the group’s centre, Clodagh Simonds and Alison O’Donnell, desired to be swaddled in. As a result of if the album has a narrative, it’s a typical one for the interval and the era, of wanting to maneuver away from the stifling metropolis and discover freedom, enlightenment and escape out within the countryside, in a pure realm that isn’t freed from strangeness and hazard: wandering brigands, birds of ailing omen, faery creatures, coffins and crows.

However at what level does protecting swaddling tip over into overprotective suffocation? “Reverend Sisters”, slower, brooding and reflective, stands aside from the opposite tracks. It harks again to the ladies’ youthful days on the Holy Youngster Convent Faculty in Dublin, the place they met and started making music. The nuns who taught them, they recall, summoned them to their workplace to teach them that life isn’t a dream, and knowledge will include the years. The music’s retort to the sisters is that knowledge did come, however not the sort they’d in thoughts. “Now the veils are lifted from my eyes and I can see,” it concludes. The inclusion of this backstory provides the album a mature footing, their childhood a yardstick by which to measure the broader horizons they now goal at.

Simonds and O’Donnell acknowledged making music collectively in 1963, on the age of 10, and took the identify Mellow Candle a few years later. 1967 discovered the duo recording a demo which made its method – after receiving airplay on Radio Luxembourg – to the ears of a expertise scout for the actor David Hemmings, who was then seeking to break into music manufacturing. He invited them to London, the place they recorded two songs with an orchestra. Simon Napier-Bell put them out as a single in August 1968, nevertheless it didn’t make a lot of a dent and the buddies parted firm. Three years on, within the kernel of Britain’s psych-folk Indian summer season, they gave it one other go. The girlish whimsy had given method to a extra windswept vibe. O’Donnell introduced David Williams, the guitarist in one other band she’d been taking part in with. Preliminary rehearsals and writing periods occurred within the suitably rural stables on the house of Simonds’s dad and mom’ home. John Peel hosted the Wexford Competition of Dwelling Music, the place the Candle had been on the invoice, and A&R man/future Chiswick/Ace Information founder Ted Carroll, then managing Skinny Lizzy, amongst others, took them underneath his wing. (He organized for Simonds to play keyboards and Mellotron on Lizzy’s second album, Shades Of A Blue Orphanage.) Ultimately after a couple of false begins, together with a demo recorded with Caravan’s drummer Richard Coughlan, new members Frank Boylan (bass) and William Murray (drums) had been employed. December 1971 discovered them at Tollington Park Studios in North London, the place they recorded Swaddling Songs in a couple of days. It was launched on Deram, the experimental/progressive arm of Decca Information.

The remainder of the situations are set out within the fields and moors, the perennial panorama of legend in these isles. “Heaven Heath” opens the document with a harpsichord waltz and a romantic vignette, in an Emily Bronte/Christine Rossetti mode, of a lady, a headstone and a lifeless youngster. “Sheep Season” performs out the age-old enmity between shepherd and wolf, whereas the swaggering, Jefferson Airplane-ish “The Poet And The Witch” opens with an atmospheric snatch of taped tide and gulls. Like lots of Mellow Candle’s songs, it’s a stream-of-consciousness mulch of folk-myth archetypes, watered by a food regimen of romantic lyrical ballads and the visionary-pastoral idealism of WB Yeats. It’s additionally a fantastic instance of the 2 girls’s highly effective mixed vocals. The following, “Messenger Birds”, showcases O’Donnell’s hovering solo voice in a music that sails the same course to the place Sandy Denny was heading at precisely the identical time on The North Star Grassman and the Ravens.

Elsewhere, on “Vile Excesses” and the heavy “Lonely Man”, the Candle lock into their most interesting rhythmic grooves and recommend – within the absence of stay tapes – their potential as a jam band, with some sturdy striding piano from Simonds and twanging electrical guitar efficiency from Williams.

For Mellow Candle, the wilderness supplied an enchanted antidote to the crushing boredom of metropolis life. The final observe comprises simply two strains of textual content, in addition to wordless chants: “I do know the Dublin pavements/Shall be boulders on my grave”. Neither one in every of Candle’s founders allowed the rocks to collect, regardless that the band, broke and unnoticed, couldn’t wrestle on for much longer after the album’s launch. They’ve every loved fascinating, self-driven musical careers within the a long time since. Clodagh Simonds was employed as Richard Branson’s PA at Virgin Information, and made visitor vocal appearances on Mike Oldfield’s natural ambient LPs Hergest Ridge and Ommadawn. After residing in South Africa for a few years she returned and in 2005 shaped experimental people band Fovea Hex. For Alison O’Donnell the Nineteen Seventies concerned being a member of people band Flibbertigibbett, however in newer occasions she has joined forces with Steven Collins’s various people collective The Owl Service, shaped her personal unit United Bible Research, and in 2022 launched a solo people album Hark The Voice That Sings For All. If something stays of the Mellow Candle period in Fovea Hex and UBS, it’s the sense of openness to the second, the musical fluidity and the deal with atmospheric texture. Above all, they’ve lastly affirmed that it’s doable to thrive on making an uncompromised music far-off from something perceived because the mainstream.