My songs are based in a certain vision of the English pastoral - of a modern English melancholy. I'm from the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. I lived in California for 12 years, but back in England now, to stay. Here, with my wife and children, are where my bones belong. Mine is a deep love affair with our soft and savage, fragile and friable rural England; every coppice and spinney, stonewall and stile, washing line and wickergate, beermug and barstool, has a story to tell; some of which I try...
My songs are based in a certain vision of the English pastoral - of a modern English melancholy. I'm from the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. I lived in California for 12 years, but back in England now, to stay. Here, with my wife and children, are where my bones belong. Mine is a deep love affair with our soft and savage, fragile and friable rural England; every coppice and spinney, stonewall and stile, washing line and wickergate, beermug and barstool, has a story to tell; some of which I try to put in my songs, songs with a foot in the past and an eye to the future. I seek a half-glimpsed other England; the England for which John Mortimer wrote there is no known cure; myth-deluded; where the ordinary and level headed is overlaid and faceted with fantasy and folk-memory; where commonsense meets sixth sense meets nonsense. Can't bear to be a daub, in the awful portrait of the anxious lives newsreaders, nowadays, seem devoted to painting us into. Rather then, to sing songs with that peculiarly English mix of optimistic melancholy, willing my mind's eye to float me above some green patch of hillside and woodland, where magic might still be discovered, nestling beneath our everyday, if only we look hard enough. In that place, my ancestors look up from their wheelwrighting and their walking to market; they smile to me in quiet encouragement, while the Cotswolds arch away and away... and there's my Grandfather, straight-backed and forever the Royal Gloucestershire Hussar, telling me, in his understated way, "That's a nice song our Tim".
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