AND ALSO THE TREES I - The Dark Countryside Beyond

Most people - well, a lot of people - come across their favourite band during their teenage years. I was 23 when I came across the band I was to love the most. Nearly sixteen years later to that autumn day when I bought my first album by then. There wasn't even a shiver of premonition that this band would come to mean so much to me.

Autumn 1995. I was studying illustration in Southampton, a bleak and gloomy city I barely think about now, despite the fact I spent nearly two years living there. I lived in a shared house in the notorious St Marys area, one of the city's 'crime hotspots'. The mixture of poverty and racial tension in the streets made my student days a somewhat fraught experience. Because of this, unless you had to, you generally stayed in the shared house where you were living. Any trips out -especially at night- often led to unpleasant encounters with local gangs of youths - and worse. During one of my first few weeks there, as I wondered home drunk from a nightclub, in a parallel street, a woman was stabbed to death. Shortly after I left the city, the family in the house opposite where I lived killed their children, then themselves.
Not the most cheery of places.
Music, as is so often the case with less-than-happy (and actually happy) student times, proves to be a life saver. In the autumn of 1995 I was heavily in my goth phase. My stereo and walkman would consistently play the mostly European and Scandinavian likes of The Merry Thoughts, The Sons of Neverland, Ordo Equitum Solis, Christian Death, Catherines Cathedral, Engelsstaub, and Ikon...
The trouble was, of course, that such music was relatively difficult to get hold of. Aside from the occasional trip to London, or ordering by mail order from a company called Nightbreed, you had to rely on the occasional lucky find. Before the internet became ubiquitous, 'risk-purchases' would sometimes prove to be the most fortuitous way to find new music.
It was at a Southampton record fair that I was flicking through a box of CDs marked 'GOTH'. I picked up a copy of an album by a band called Lacrimosa. This actually quite excited me. I had heard a song of theirs that I had liked called 'Schackal (Piano Version)' on a German goth compilation called 'Touched by the Hand of Goth' (I know, I know.) There was nothing else in the box that grabbed my attention. No-one I had even heard of. There was an album there though that I bought because I had a spare six pounds to spend, and even a mediocre album might wile away a rainy Southampton afternoon.

It always seemed to rain in Southampton.
The album was 'The Klaxon', and the band were And Also The Trees.
However, for a good couple of weeks after this purchase, I was convinced that the band were called The Klaxon and the album was called 'And also the Trees'. For no apparent reason, I was also convinced they were French. I have no idea why.

I wish I could put up a picture of the cover here, but Blogger isn't letting me upload photographs at the moment, so I'll attempt to describe it. It looks like a kind of 'colour wood-cut'. In the foreground is the head and shoulders of a man. He is looking to his right. In the background is some kind of building. There is a blue sky.
It is also one of my favourite pieces of art of all time. I really wish I could put up an image of it here. Oh well.
Anyhow.
I got the album home, and played it, and, well... As is so often the case with things you come to love and obsess over and be fascinated by, it didn't really, well, make much of an impression at the time. Not that day anyway. But I was buying so many albums back then (where on earth did I get the money from?) that it was a miracle if anything did make an impression. I remember quite liking the first track 'Sickness Divine'. Enough that I put it on a compilation tape for a friend. I hadn't really encountered music like this before. It wasn't goth. Not really. But it was dark. Kind of 1950s-ish...
This is what I remember thinking at the time anyway. I also remember liking even more a track in the middle of the album, a song called 'Dialogue'. A soaring kind of track, joyful but curiously melancholy. And another thing that struck me. It seemed kind of English too. I couldn't really think of any other way to explain it. It just sounded English... The England that I remembered from childhood holidays at grandparents house in the Worcestershire countryside. It was the actual sound of it. Something in the guitars. Swallows in a violet sky. That call of wood pigeons at dusk. A lost, nocturnal landscape.

The autumn continued. I bought other albums - most of which I've forgotten now - and I put aside The Klaxon (after having discovered they were actually called And Also The Trees) and got on with my uninspiring coursework in an uninspiring city, and waited for my student loan to come in.

And when the student loan did finally come in - in late November - I went on a spending spree in London with my housemate Brian. I spent well over a hundred pounds on albums and CDs; Ikon, Chrome, Catherines Cathedral, Paralysed Age, a Cold Meat Industries sampler, Faith and the Muse, Love is Colder than Death, Big Electric Cat, Under Two Flags, Salvation... There were others too.

In the basement of a second hand shop, in a gatefold sleeve, I found the album 'Virus Meadow' by And Also The Trees for 50p. I remembered 'quite liking' the CD I had bought. How could I go wrong for 50p?

The cover was similarly haunting (Again, I wish I was able to put up images). It was a photograph of a bowl of fruit, beginning to decay, in what looked like a square of dusty late summer / early autumn sunlight. This was an earlier album than 1993's 'The Klaxon'. The band looked younger, even if it was released only seven years before. As Brian and myself caught the late train back from London I scanned the lyrics; 'each explosion bounces from horizon to horizon, and for a while, the slow pulse boy stood by the window' ... 'a jewel like a crumbled distorted moon' ... 'where bottled hell and blind men lay in rows' ... 'swans neck woman, childbed meadow'.

There was something about the words. I remember thinking that as I tried to stare past my own reflection in the carriage windows and into the dark countryside beyond.

It was a well over a month later before I actually listened to 'Virus Meadow'. I was in my room, freezing. A cold December night and outside the rain that seemed so urban and utterly without any kind of redemption. Smoking endless cigarettes, and term finished and waiting to go home for Christmas, and because I was looking for something to play, I turned to 'Virus Meadow'. Played it, thinking it seemed darker, more evidently 'post-punk' than 'The Klaxon.'

Then there was the last track on the album, 'Virus Meadow' itself, and I remember thinking

'this is exactly the song I've always been looking for' (I'll come to why later down the line.)

And then it was Christmas, and 1995 turned into 1996, and the Southanpton rain continued, and even though I didn't know what I was going to do when I finished my Illustration course, I would not be sad to see the back of Southampton.

I'll finish with the following.

The songs of AATT are astonishing in their ability to conjure up imagery. On 'The Klaxon' there is a track called 'Wooden Leg'. The closing guitar line brings the following image to me, as clear as something I may have seen in a film or a dream:

It is twilight. A deep summer twilight in the country. We are looking at the English countryside, a patchwork of fields and small woods and tiny villages. Church spires and trees. There is a bird, a dove in fact, that flies over this countryside. The dove flies over a large wood, and sinks down. In the centre of the wood is a ruined tower covered with ivy. It is into the exposed interior of this tower that this dove settles down to sleep. England as a tarot card for 'Mystery'.

That's the image anyway.

It hasn't faded over time.

(end of part one)