When David Thomas Broughton sings, his voice is one of empty church halls, black and white reruns of Coronation Street, of lost lives quietly winding down. It’s rich, woody and aged. R’s are extravangantly rolled, certain words - piffle, bowels, the Greggs bakery - accentuated through their sharp diction and colloqiual unexpectedness. A voice like this could only come from England. His word and guitarplay provide a link to the buried histories of traditional folk, of course, but it’s more than that.
In Ambiguity, he gently notes that ‘it’s easy to forget where you come from if there’s no question of your returning’. If there’s anything that defines England in 2010, it’s the low hum of loneliness and confusion that comes with the search for identity in a world that has collapsed to nothing. It doesn’t exist anymore, England, not really. After three hundred years of proclaiming to the rest of the world that their only worth stemmed from us finding them, it turns out we had it the wrong way round. The bile and bluster of the BNP, the Ingerlund no surrender brigade, Back off Brussels: they’re nothing but the last gasps of a nation that’s rapidly reaching a state of post-nationality - not necessarily a bad thing, but a thing all the same.
No one can remember who they are, or what they want to be, or why it’s worth remembering or working out. And it’s that fruitless effort to remember, that wracking of an empty mind for an answer that perhaps never existed, that is encapsulated by David Thomas Broughton’s looped and layered vocals, curling up to the sky like plumes of smoke from long-dead factories.
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