What is Strange Heavens?

I’ve long thought of traditional folk music as music with a postcode: songs that belong to one place, and carry it with them. I don’t think of Strange Heavens as folk, but it’s the same idea – music that belongs to Burghclere and to Stanley’s chapel. It’s the psychogeography of it that I love. It sends shivers down my spine.

I’ve been asked what Strange Heavens sounds like, and it’s not an easy question to answer. Perhaps it’s easier to describe the things I was listening to when the idea came to me.

Paul Simon’s Seven Psalms made a deep impression on me: that sense of a single continuous piece holding many different emotional registers, moving between the intimate and the vast, folding back on itself as only a song cycle can. The Shovel Dance Collective’s The Water is the Shovel of the Shore pointed at something else: the way traditional material reflects memory, collective or otherwise, and that psychogeography is as relevant to music as it is to any other art form, if not more so. I want Strange Heavens to belong as much to Burghclere as Stanley’s paintings belong to Cookham.

Further back, I studied Pierre Schaeffer at university and have never entirely shaken off an interest in musique concrète, in found sound and the texture of the world as musical material. And perhaps the piece that has stayed with me longest is Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet – the way it moves in and out of solidity and structure, the way a fragment of something half-heard appears to carry the entire weight of a life. It always seemed to me to be about the echo of memory: the way certain things persist, surface, dissolve, and return. When I stood inside Sandham Memorial Chapel and looked at those murals, I felt something similar. Spencer had done it in paint.

I’ve always been influenced by the Englishness of Nick Drake, especially Bryter Layter, where you can hear the long shadows at the end of summer falling across the Warwickshire fields. The Beatles’ White Album was on the list too – you can’t make an album inspired by the wonderful parts of England without having the Beatles in there.

There’s no question that there are hints of the Kinks and Blur in this album, which is why having Graham Coxon involved has been a nice circle completing. He’s a big fan of Stanley too. He doesn’t play on ‘What-Ho Giotto’, but I remember describing the song to him as something that sat alongside ‘The Debt Collector’ from Parklife, on which he played sax. I think it’s more Kinksy than that, though. For some reason, ‘Shangri-La’ comes to mind.

The horns aren’t just colour. Spencer’s chapel is a war memorial, and brass was the sound of that war – military bands, hymn tunes played by regimental musicians, the kind of thing that would have drifted across a camp in Macedonia or rung out at a homecoming. It felt wrong to leave that texture out.

Spencer was raised the child of a musician – his father was a music teacher, and Bach was a particular passion – and he loved music all his life. He also had a profound attachment to place, to Cookham in particular. His letters mention hearing other soldiers singing traditional songs in the hospital and at the front. What we now call traditional folk music was most likely a far more present and natural part of his world than it is of ours.

Nina’s got a far better feel for this material than I do. ‘Green Bushes’ was collected in Cookham Dean while Stanley was still a child. We can’t claim he definitely knew it, but it’s unmistakably of his time and place. ‘Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still’ became the signature tune of the Royal Army Medical Corps only two years before Stanley arrived at Beaufort, which makes it close to a certainty that he’d have known it well.

None of this is decoration. The idea is to put our own response to Stanley’s art alongside the music we believe would genuinely have been part of his world.