The Boxed Set #2: ‘Siop Enoc Huges’

Recorded mostly around the same time as last month’s reissue, this was sort of conceived as the acoustic companion EP to the electronic ‘The Monkeys of the Shitty Island’ – which will be next month.

This one is more successful in that it does in fact only feature acoustic guitars and vocals – albeit slightly out of tune ones. ‘Monkeys’ managed to break all the rules I’d imposed on it, but this EP sticks to its remit of only using one instrument. As such it’s hard to find a lot to say about it! It’s the most traditional singer-songwriter record in the PWL discography, everything else mixed it up a little with other instruments and experiments and such.

The title is the name of a little heritage site in Aberystwyth. A shop has been preserved as it would have been during the 1930s, with items that would have been on sale at the time in the window. There’s a hand sewn sign explaining its presence saying it hopes to ‘delight’ you as you pass – which is incredibly cute. I’m not sure who Enoc Hughes was.

Here it is on Google Streetview, as far as I know it’s still there….

Here’s a little about each song:

J.L.B. Smith

This song was inspired by reading the book ‘A Fish Caught in Time’ about the rediscovery of the Coelacanth, a pre-historic fish which was thought to be extinct for 65 million years before being found alive in reasonable abudance. They’re very rarely seen because they live so deep in the water that low pressure kills them, hence they don’t get kept in aquariums etc. They have legs and are an example of a still-living evolutionary ‘missing link’.

Kittens and the Sea

No particular thoughts on this one. Some nice fingerpicking and pretty self explanatory lyrics. I think I wrote this just so I had a song with ‘kittens’ in it for Mrs Lu.

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Later re-recorded for ‘The Independent Scrutineer’.

A song for when yr just tired

This song is quite a bit older than the others. Having been recorded live and very quickly in Cardiff the previous year. Another straightforward song. Unusual in that it names three real life people. I remember being very worried they might be offended at the time.

An Easter Island statue in my bed

Probably my favourite on this CD. Another finger picky one but running through some more complex and abstract lyrics that I favoured for a while. Some of the imagery came from a dream. Some of the lines will strike a chord with anyone who took their English GCSE from the same workbook as me in 1998.

Again the EP’s up for ‘pay what you want’, and everything you pay gets put back into future PWL music (of which more soon…).

Tags: aberystwyth