(Cooking Vinyl)Lee’s twee-free third album, produced by Bernard Butler and featuring Liz Fraser, is a stark reminder of this country’s environmental concerns
Sam Lee has always sat slightly awkwardly within folk music. He has a raffish campness live, that betrays his past as a burlesque dancer. He had a Top 20 single last year when he edited birdsong together for the RSPB’s Let Nature Sing. He’s now made an album produced by guitar demigod Bernard Butler, with guest vocals from the Cocteau Twins’ rarely heard Liz Fraser. Such cheek only reveals his desire to project his love of folk further.
Old Wow is Lee’s phrase about the enduring power of nature. But the crisis that surrounds it twists its gnarly roots around these songs. His choices are obviously political: in Turtle Dove, he isn’t mourning a metaphorical lover, as many have before him, but the actual bird, which is facing extinction. In The Moon Shines Bright, a song Lee collected from Gypsy singer Freda Black, he mourns “our time is not long / Time’s an old folk song”, as Liz Fraser sings a fragment of Scottish ballad Wild Mountain Thyme around him, high and eerie like a nightingale, about the summertime blooming. The effect is urgent, far from twee.