Phil Taylor picks his own personal highlight from Record Store Day 2023...
Record Store Day seemed to draw the crowds this year, with a noticeable buzz around Hockley and the Lace Market in particular. The queue for the record shop at Rough Trade reached most of the way down Broad Street at several points. Upstairs, there was a well-curated programme of DJs and musicians performing from noon until late, with the bar and stage area pretty well full for most of that time. Amid the eclectic live line-up, one performer stood out to me.
Ella Clayton is a modern folk singer-songwriter from East London. She released her stand-out debut album in September 2022, quickly establishing herself as a name to watch. She travelled up to Nottingham for the day to perform on the Rough Trade stage as part of the RSD line-up.
Ella writes wistful, highly emotive tales: a tender kind of modern folk featuring well laid out stories of life and in particular relationships with all their joys and pains laid bare - think elements of Laura Marling, Nick Drake, and Jeff Buckley. She’s one of those singer-songwriters who speaks right into your heart, homing in, unerringly, with pinpoint accuracy to expose your feelings, and share them with you. In the intimate setting, she came into her own, her careful delivery gradually winning out over the hubbub of the bar area.
Here, Ella took the opportunity to showcase a number of tracks from her album, Murmurations, starting with the title track. In many ways this is the perfect set opener, with the open-D tuning establishing a solid, warm basis to the song, which then opens up with those first lyrics “Hello, how have you been? Where to begin - it’s been so long.”
From there, she moved into Endling, a break-up song. This was a heart-rending and memorable performance which made the most of Ella’s clearly well-trained voice. The song is a meandering one which includes some very effective, long-held notes and gorgeous chord changes. It ends with a gentle descent into controlled chaos in terms of the melodic changes and perfect dissonances. To sing this live requires real skill and accuracy, and boy did she nail it.
To be honest, that was the song that made the set for me. But there were a generous five more to come. Also from the album was Ivy Violet, in honour of a grandmother, featuring some remarkable vocals laid over deceptively simple chord progressions. Here You Are, an unreleased song, was a real beauty - a ‘friendship love song’ about that sense of gratefulness that your life has crossed with that of a special friend. Please Me, also unreleased, was an extremely well written one with a great sense of flow and beautiful progression. Next, the engrossing Only Bodies, Ella’s first single, and finally Foolish Man, the album’s closing track, built around a more-upbeat rhythm which cleverly jars against the hard-edged righteously-vengeful nature of the theme.
Ella’s voice provides the solid core - the beating heart - to all of her songs. Heard live, it has a lovely, well-defined edge at the top end and a subtle huskiness at the bottom. She’s a captivating performer, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was very glad Ella made the trip up from London to grace the Rough Trade stage.
You can catch Ella at Latitude Festival this summer, on a stage curated by George Ezra, and there’s a new 5-track EP coming out later this year.
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