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Rev Simpkins and the Phantom Folk performed Saltings at St Andrew's Wickford this evening.
Saltings is an album of ten illustrations by Tom Knight and ten songs by Matt Simpkins created in and about the ‘saltings’ of Essex. It is a loving portrait of the mystery and beauty of this salt marsh wilderness, and a meditation on the real human cost of the wilderness time of the pandemic.
Found within 50 miles from London, the saltings are one of England’s last natural wild spaces. Working as a parish priest a few miles away, Matt came to the saltings to retreat and compose these compelling and compassionate songs about his community’s real-life experiences during the pandemic. Saltings portrays hope found amid wilderness.
The album weaves together tales of the legendary and mysterious figures of the saltings, such as John Ball (leader of the peasants’ revolt) and Saint Cedd (whose Saxon chapel stands at Bradwell), with reflections on the wilderness’s ever-changing tides, skies, and seasons. Saltings is an attempt to share the atmosphere and history of this remarkable place in picture and song.
Sinner songster, guttural gospeller & pop-poet-priest, the Rev’d Matt Simpkins’s music is an unholy brew of bruising freak blues, string-snapping finger-twanged folk, and sanctified psychedelia. Shades of Captain Beefheart, Pavement, and the Kinks meld with Evensong choirs and pipe organs, pre-war Gospel Blues, string orchestras, brass bands, and Bert Jansch style finger-picking.
Before he became the fourth generation of his family to be ordained as an Anglican priest, Matt came to musical notoriety through his raucous exploits in Fuzzface, Gospel-fiddle duo Sons of Joy, as a solo artist performing as Rev Simpkins & the Phantom Notes, and by collaborating with the remaining members of the Small Faces to reconstruct their LP Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake.
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Rev Simpkins - Plough Sunday.
