Ashley's unique album Ninety-nine.
Impressions
by Talking Elephant Records
When you think of Ashley Hutchings, chances are you’ll think first of the folk rock pioneer,
the scholarly reinvention of the English tradition for the electric age, and those irresistibly
propulsive bass lines. But then there’s the rocker, the balladeer, and the multifaceted Musical
Director at the National Theatre: the polymath always searching for the essence and making it
new.
At this point in his distinguished career, Ninety-Nine. Impressions is both a surprise and the
most logical album one could expect, being a sequence of poems and prose pieces set to
minimal musical accompaniment. Spoken word has been a part of Ashley’s work since
Steeleye Span, perhaps most notably on Rattlebone and Ploughjack and An Hour with Cecil
Sharp, but this is the first album to be centred entirely upon the voice. While a long way from
folk rock, what connects it to his most celebrated work from the past half-century or so is its
historical and cultural depth reframed for the immediate present.
Making virtue of lockdown necessity, the album was initially conceived as a collage or
conversation constructed from quotations Ashley had gathered in a treasured notebook over
recent years: from books, television and radio, writers, artists and filmmakers sharing wisdom
and bons mots over a soundtrack provided by Blair Dunlop and Jacob Stoney with Ruth
Angell and Sid Peacock. At Blair’s suggestion, though, Ashley’s own poems and lyrics were
added to the mix, and the project took on a whole new complexion.
The set begins with the possibly apocryphal quotation attributed to Camus: Don’t walk
behind me, I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me
and be my friend, which sets the tone for what follows. It’s a record which privileges neither
Ashley nor the gathered voices; rather, it’s a conversation amongst friends – at times
profound but always playful – in which the listener is invited to join. Recorded from Ashley’s
sofa with no studio effects, with intuitively sympathetic arrangements, it’s that rare thing: a
spoken word album to be listened to over and over with new discoveries revealed each time.
Playfulness is definitely an element, confirms Ashley, and one of the games is to guess which
of the illustrious cast of characters said what, while another is to make your own connections
and interpretations. I can confirm that I think in heaven we should eat nothing but ice cream
is from Angela Carter and nods towards Ashley’s legendary love of gelato, though any
connection with the 99 of the album’s title is purely coincidental or, at least, subconscious.
Striking in its originality, Ninety-Nine. Impressions nonetheless feels like a record Ashley
was always going to make and, as has so often been the case since those early Fairport
albums, it brims with both intelligence and feeling. Ashley’s status as a pivotal figure in
British folk and rock remains unassailable but as well as that: well, Shoot – that boy can
write!