The Owl Service’s Always We Are Destroyed hits the shops this weekend; a wide-ranging compilation across two CDs comprising thirty-eight tracks and encompassing the entire extent of their history. The collective, helmed by Essex-based Steve Collins and subject to his vision, formed in the mid-2000s inspired by the triad of The Eighteenth Day Of May, Espers, and The Memory Band; this being the era of New Weird America, Arthur, when Green Man was still a folk festival.
While The Eighteenth Day Of May would blaze a bright but brief trail; the total extant recorded oeuvre fitting onto a double album (coincidentally reissued last week to mark their twentieth anniversary); The Owl Service has proved mightily prolific, and despite rumours and even declarations of their demise, flourish yet. From their beginning multi-instrumentalist Collins surrounded himself with a host of singular performers; among them singers Diana Collier and Nancy Wallace, and banjo-player and guitarist Jason Steel.
The project involved recording and releasing new and innovative, psychedelic-hued readings of traditional folk songs, and then presenting these in live settings. Three albums appeared over the decade to 2016; A Garland Of Song, The Pattern Beneath The Plough, and His Pride, No Spear, No Friend; but on top of them an awful lot of other material surfaced across labels like Hobby-Horse, Rif Mountain, Stone Tapes, and Static Caravan.
Always We Are Destroyed serves as both a very necessary and rewarding introduction and a useful reacquaintance, as Collins with fresh help-mates prepares to inaugurate a new phase of The Owl Service. The set is organised more or less chronologically beginning with two Collins’ originals ‘Wake the Vaulted Echo’ and ‘By the Setting of the Sun’; the latter extending across more than eight minutes of exemplary sonic exploration with disembodied vocal belatedly arriving. Likewise ‘Night Falls On Summer’s End’ – a co-write with Dom Cooper featuring the latter’s seemingly wordless vocals – seems imbued with soundtrack and effect redolent to the so-called ‘haunted generation’.
There are plenty of superlative voices too; Wallace with ‘Turpin Hero’, and Collier’s take on ‘Katie Cruel’. Mellow Candle’s Alison O’Donnell features on ‘The Wooden Coat’ and ‘William, and Earl Richard’s Daughter’. A splendid ‘The Banks of the Nile’ from Jo Lepine opens the second disc, followed by three tracks with brass arrangements from Magnus Dearness culminating in the marvellous ‘Willie O’Winsbury (Reprise)’ Cuts from His Pride, No Spear, No Friend then point to a time when Collins grew ‘tired of folk’ and so put together an album inspired by the post-rock of Shellac, Shipping News, and their ilk.
It was still folk songs though notably there were more covers from nearer-contemporary writers; Gwydion Pendderwen’s ‘Spring Strathspey’, ‘The Skater’ from Ken Saul (Stone Angel), Ken Jaquet’s ‘Sea Song’ (Caedmon). But it did seem The Owl Service’s final hurrah, at least until the back end of the pandemic when the Rise Up Rise Up tracks surfaced, from which comes the blistering ‘She Moves Through The Fair’. Then an Owl Service line-up played the 2023 Leigh Folk Festival, and within a year a steady flow of CD-Rs and digital material was turning up on Bandcamp.
With fresh voices Dorothy Chappell and Rebecca Leivers to the fore, and a Fruits de Mer single A Tribute To Sandy Denny gleaning valuable publicity, the ensemble has chalked up a series of low-key but well-received live appearances. The last half-dozen tracks here all come from the last twelve months, and include Chappell’s readings of Denny’s ‘The Sea’ and Anne Briggs ‘Time Has Come’ from the themed Will the Waters Hold My Burden. Leivers provides the reliably bloody ‘Long Lankin’ from Dead Hours Of The Night, Mike Sagar-Fenton’s ‘Stars’ as sung by Brenda Wootton, along with the previously unissued ‘Brigg Fair’. From: https://nickbob.com/2026/05/30/the-owl-service-always-we-are-destroyed-hobby-horse-records/?fbclid=IwY2xjawTGisFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEe9Fd3IH2UCZ7t9-fg0e-jqL52qtHbMlSl369JknhFdQBVhZJHdVjz7VY9E4A_aem_Y5aCafHOM_GeKbU8qXPlNg
