MUSIC

Coexist Collectivists Henry Dingle and Samantha Marais are each releasing solo albums this week – but the increasingly collaborative singer-songwriters’ll be teaming up to promote them together. So what’s the big ideal? asks Julian Owen.

"We thought he was going to give us grief,” says Henry Dingle, of the northern farmer who’d pulled up alongside his common land-parked campervan. “But he just wanted a song. There he was with his sheepdog on the back of his quad bike, midday, and he was just a fan of life and that form of communication.” It was summer 2009, and the London born and raised singer-songwriter was on his Freedom Tour, playing over 30 impromptu gigs from Devon to Dunkeld and back, and undergoing a fundamental shift in his musical outlook. “A hatful of completely diverse experiences that will stay with me forever. Some of the folk sessions were a complete eye opener – I totally fell in love with unamplified performance in pubs in the Peak District, another in North Devon. The most honest music I’ve ever heard – no one’s chasing a career, no one’s Facebooking afterwards.”

A subsequent move to Bristol – and meeting fellow incoming kindred spirit Samantha Marais – cemented the new communitarian ideal. Firstly, at the nascent Coexist Collective in Hamilton House. “Until May 2010, when we joined, it had been consumed by the overwhelming day-to-day practicalities of taking on and running this huge, previously derelict office block,” recalls Sam, via email from India (the reason for which will become clear anon). “Henry and I – with guidance from the directors – set about founding the Coexist Music Collective. We held an initial meeting with 80 local music industry representatives to brainstorm how we could best start working together as a creative community in a harsh economic climate,” says Sam. One idea was a showcase/feedback evening, with performers playing to a panel of local industry representatives. When Rock Desk was invited along, it was impressed to discover a genuinely constructive atmosphere. “We also began running weekly meetings strategising team approaches to empowering artists,” continues Sam, “and launched Bristol's Longest Day celebration of unamplified performances from dawn ’til dusk on a micro-stage on College Green.” The full list of achievements and schemes is a lengthy one, but let’s tarry awhile on this last point. “The Longest Day is a really pure reflection of our intention in Bristol,” says Henry, “with musicians getting together, not staying apart and being isolated. This year we want a solid bill of 150 musicians playing a song each.” Interested? Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Both Sam and Henry are viewing ‘community’ in ever wider terms as proponents of Balanced View (nee Great Freedom), a global group connected online “to provide a lean, flexible understanding of the definition of ‘human’,” as the official description has it. Henry offers a more prosaic alternative: “To experience what it can be like when everyone takes responsibility for their own shit, to put it bluntly.” He’s just back from “two incredible months of community living” with BV in India (Sam is still there), almost bashful at his conviction in the scheme’s virtues but compelled to share them. “I’ve never had a religious/spiritual thing in my life, and most people arrive to it very cynical, but it’s more sense than I’ve ever heard: learning how to live completely liberated from stuff that prevents us doing everything we want to do in life, feeling everything fully in the moment, no longer a slave to those feelings of ‘I wish I was...’ We live, at best, a few years behind where we’d like to be, and that’s fucking crazy.”

On Mon 4 Apr, Sam and Henry release solo albums. His: ‘The Boy Who Never Learned’, wherein his wistful voice breaks into Vedder-isms in more high-powered moments, accompanied by strings and glock, percussive shakers and tambourines. It could have been recorded at any time since the release of ‘Astral Weeks’. Hers: ‘At My Door’ is a beautifully playful affair, tellingly beginning with the winding of a musical box and a skipping song. Given her easy, charm-filled voice and lightly dancing phrasing, believers in reincarnation would take a confident punt on her having been Icelandic in a previous life.

Solo albums they might be, but they will be sold for the price of one, bound in ribbon. And, on the forthcoming ‘Break On Through’ tour, all songs will be performed together. Henry is clearly delighted at the pair’s continuing collaboration. The alternative is “a lot of time on your own, thinking about yourself – this is so much more fun. We’ve found it amazing to be weaning ourselves off that slightly self-obsessive view.”

Drawing on experiences including India, Coexist and, indeed, a farmer on his quad bike, the gigs will offer full participatory roles for all. “We’re throwing it totally open. The best music nights I’ve been to have been free and easy like that. I’m not sure any more about going in adulation and hearing someone and walking away satisfied – I don’t get that any more, however much I might revere someone. So, we’ll start and finish the show and run open mic in the middle. It’s another aspect of the magic we’re trying to reconnect with.”

SAM & HENRY PLAYED THE CUBE, BRISTOL ON SAT 9 APR. FFI: WWW.SAMANDHENRY.CO.UK
 

Copyright Julian Owen 2011

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