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Eye-to-Eye with the Valley People

Tracks ordered as on CD

 

Eye-to-Eye with the Valley People

***

 4.39

 

i2i

E

Like A Light

***

4.02

 

i2i

E

Magpie

***

3.20

 

i2i

E

Nothing At All

***

 4.23

 

i2i

E

The September People

***

4.27

 

i2i

E

 

All tracks written and composed by Davies/Baker. © Copyright Sister Company 2006.

Female vocal arrangements by Mary-Bernadette Baker. © Copyright Mary-Bernadette Baker 2006.

All male vocals and instruments performed by Stephen Davies.

All female vocals performed by Mary-Bernadette Baker.

Special thanks to Andrea at Parr St. Studios, Liverpool for enhancing the final mixes on Like A Light, Magpie and The September People.

Eye-to-Eye with the Valley People and Nothing At All were mastered at Topfloor Studios, London. Special thanks to Pete Maher.

 

Eye-to-Eye with the Valley People is inspired by some old cine footage, which we picked up in a shop in Eltham (South-East London) in 2002. Most of the film is in colour, and shot in the mid-late 50s and very early 60s. There are a lot of ‘road’ sequences, shot in Wales, London and the Home Counties, showing vintage traffic, road signs and street furniture, fashions of that era, animals, snow, sunshine, caravans, scooter rides, country pubs, smoky working-class bars, darts players, pre-Coronation Street barmaids, nurses in funny hats, period hospital scenes… …I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture by now.

 

Watching this stuff for probably the first time since it was filmed was a moving, but somehow eerie experience. Many of the people featured were now dead, and possibly forgotten. The families involved could just as easily be around now, and their fate could just as easily be ours. Mortality aside, I felt privileged, though sad to replay a previous reality first-hand in such a tangible form, yet powerless to bring any of it back. You could build a film set which looked the same, and even live in it for a while, but unless you could erase all memory of what followed, the experience would be hollow.

 

Things can only move forward, but I would like to put a video together for the title track, intercut with a pastiche of this footage, if copyright issues can be resolved here.