The Drift: An Interview With Amelia Fletcher & Rob Pursey (Heavenly, Marine Research, The Catenary Wires) About Their New Project

The newest album to feature Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey is about as far as you could get from Heavenly's earliest indie-pop roots. Pairing with poet Nancy Gaffield, along with Darren Pilcher, the musicians have brought to life poetry about the landscape of Kent. That the poems were written by an American adds an interesting twist to this whole thing. The entirety of Wealden, out today, works as a kind of concept album, but it's also Art-with-a-capital-'A'. That said, it's remarkably easy to enjoy, and the kind of release that achieves a noble end through the simplest of methods.

To give you a bit of background on this project from The Drift, I sat down with Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey to talk about Wealden.

Kenixfan: What was the origin of this project and how did you both get involved?

ROB PURSEY: I'd started making music with Darren Pilcher, a friend of ours who lives in our little village in Kent. Darren had developed a really interesting way of creating sound loops out of real, organic materials -- leaves being scrunched, sticks being snapped -- which immediately yielded a very powerful atmosphere. When I accompanied him with deep repetitive bass-lines, we realised we were cooking up something very interesting and kind of intoxicating. Amelia joined us and added harmonium, melodica, and other reedy instruments. There were no vocals. We called this new band 'The Drift'. It seemed an appropriate name, because we had no real intention of doing anything other than meeting once a week in an out-building in the middle of nowhere and improvising our long, atmospheric pieces. But we knew there was something really good about it.

It all came into focus when I met Nancy Gaffield, an American poet based at the University of Kent in Canterbury. I was actualy seeking her help -- I was organising 'Words and Music at the Skep', a festival of poetry and indie music in our village. I was very keen to invite Stephanie Burt, a great poet (and great indie fan!) who's based in Boston. With help from the University, it might be possible to raise the funds to fly Stephanie over. And it worked. The festival was a great success -- lots of poets and lots of musicians performed, including our old friend Calvin Johnson. But what also happened was that I talked with Nancy about her work as a poet. She had recently published 'Meridian', which was based on a walk across the East of England, along the Meridian Line. I wondered if she would be interested in combining forces with us -- if she were to walk across our local landscape of woods and marshes, and was inspired to write, her words might combine well with our music. (By now, we had started referring to our music as Marsh Dub. It was very much inspired by the environment we live in.) She agreed to try it -- and Wealden was underway.

Kenixfan: Given how far removed this is from your own usual musical endeavors, how did you approach the task of composing the music here? Where there any particular challenges here that you wouldn't have faced when making a Catenary Wires album, for example?

AMELIA FLETCHER: We decided early on that one of the most interesting aspects of the Wealden landscape was its geology, and decided that the music should reference that by building up layers from the loamy bass at the bottom, through Darren's looped crackles, with my various instruments on the top. We were also determined that the music should be led by the poetry. For me personally one of the hardest things was finding parts that avoided being too obvious, but also weren't over-pretentious, and which weren’t boring, but were also not so interesting that they detracted from Nancy's words.

Kenixfan: For those outside the U.K., what is it about the Kentlands that inspired this poetry and project?

ROB PURSEY: It's a particular part of Kent where we live. It's in the South-Western part of the county. It's very thinly populated here, and feels to be a long way from London (even though it's only 70 or 80 miles distant). We are on the edge of the Weald, a protected area that includes lots of dense woodland and small villages, which tend still to conform to a pre-C20 layout, with a church, a pub, a few cottages, maybe a shop. It's very pretty: picture-postcard pretty in places. But then, the Weald gives way to Romney Marsh and a whole expanse of boggy flatlands that are only a few feet above sea level. Things are much bleaker here, and much more mysterious. You can still get lost here. The area was famous for bloodthirsty smuggling gangs. The land is criss-crossed with drainage ditches and natural streams. There are ancient churches that sit isolated on the marsh -- the villages that they once served have long since disappeared. And then, where the marshes meet the sea, you have Dungeness. This is a unique environment -- it's a shingle spit, which feels transitory, uncanny, and unstable. All the buildings here are only one-storey high as the ground shifts too much for anything taller to be built, except for -- and this is a big exception -- a nuclear power station.

And there is one big fact about this environment that inspired the piece: it's mostly only 800 years old. Back in the Thirteenth Century, when it was a shallow estuary, a Great Storm pushed tons of shingle up from the sea and sealed it off, allowing people to drain it and cultivate it. And now, as sea levels start to rise, there is every chance that it will be one of the first parts of the UK to be permanently submerged. It might turn out to be one of the shortest-lived, most transitory human habitats. So it's a microcosm for the global process that we are all struggling to come to terms with. Wealden is, to some extent, about all this.

Kenixfan: How much involvement with Nancy Gaffield did you have while you were composing the music? Was there any input as to what sounds you should bring, or any influence that allowed you to go in interesting directions with the music? Any surprises on either side as this all came together?

AMELIA FLETCHER: What was really great about the project was the fact that the words and music were genuinely co-created. Nancy decided early on that she would write three longish poems, but she only had a draft of the first when we first got together. As she read the poem, we started to compose around her, and she then started to change how she wrote. The latter two poems are actually much looser than the first with more breathing spaces for the music to emerge through. They are great poems in their own right and work well on the page as well, but they were definitely intended to be performed alongside our music. The last poem even refers to the harmonium "breathing out, breathing in".

There were a couple of amusing moments along the way when she decided to remove lines without realising that we were relying on them as musical cues, but we figured it all out in the end. Although, it was still semi-improvised even by the end. We had to record the whole thing live, as it was never the same twice. I like the fact that the recording just captures the piece at a particular moment, like a photograph. If we hadn't gone into lockdown pretty much straight after we'd recorded it, it might already have evolved. As it is, we've spent some of lockdown filming the same landscape to make a film to accompany the recording. We aim to premiere the complete film at a special event soon, but we'll make a few parts of it available over the next few weeks.

Kenixfan: Given your busy schedules with The Catenary Wires, European Sun, and the upcoming Heavenly re-issue, will you have time for more projects like this, ones that are a bit outside your normal lanes of operation?

ROB PURSEY: Yes, we will definitely do more as The Drift. We'll get back in the out-building once a week and see what emerges. We plan to release an EP of music next year, once we have refined a few of the instrumentals we've been working on. And after that we will collaborate with another vocalist, and it could be another poet like Nancy. But it could be a different kind of voice. We have talked about recording interviews with the older generation of Marsh-dwellers and setting their stories to music. What's great about this format is that anyone can be a lead vocalist. And the chemistry between the words and music is unpredictable and un-premeditated. It's an ongoing experiment...

A big thanks to Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey for their time today!

Wealden is out now via the link below.

More details on The Drift via the official website.