Across four decades Ben Watt has maintained a committed forward- looking course, from the ardent echo-drenched folk of his early solo work with Robert Wyatt, through seventeen years as musical mainspring and co-lyricist in the best-selling Everything But The Girl with Tracey Thorn – and ten at the helm of his smart electronic label Buzzin’ Fly – to his recent moving non-fiction and mid-life solo albums, the award- winning ‘Hendra’ (2014) and ‘Fever Dream’ (2016).
New album ‘Storm Damage’ (out January 2020) is no exception. Sonically adventurous, lyrically detailed and engaged, the album – written and produced by Watt – is a personal journey through anxiety and change cut through with an insistent defiance.
Sonically the album forgoes the acclaimed twin-guitar
Keeley Forsyth, is the 40-year-old actor with a familiar, pale-eyed, haunting face, whom we have seen in recent years in Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley, The Casual Vacancy and Waterloo Road. She is also a musician & the special guest of Ben Watt for this Cluny2 show.
Forsyth’s voice marries Peggy Lee’s bluesy vibrato with Nico’s thunderous terror, and delivers lyrics that invert nature, as a way of exploring despair. Her stark and spacious, arrangements, are of an avant-garde proposition. Keeley says that she will deliver an experience, she promises, that’s “really primal and intuitive.