There are a thousand words you might use to describe Darren Hayman, but monotonous is certainly not one them. Over the past thirty odd years, the English songwriter has made music of all stripes and colours, be it as part of nineties favourites Hefner or spiky indie pop outfit New Starts, in collaboration with artists like Dan May (Owl & Mouse / Field Glass), David Watkins and David Tattersall (The Wave Pictures), Emma Kupa and Anthony Harding, or under his own name. The thematic concerns of his work have been no less wide-ranging, with albums exploring everything from William Morris and good old British lidos to astronauts, grief, socialism and trains.
Back in May we shared an updated version of Hayman, Watkins, Trout And Lee, a bluegrass record which combined original material with covers of genre classics, and hinted that the release might be the start of a wider project to unearth the full depth of Darren Hayman’s substantial back catalogue and reinvigorate it for the digital age. This process has quietly continued across recent weeks. Previously missing titles from Hefner have reappeared via his own imprint Belka, as well as releases from The French, The Secondary Modern and his debut solo EP Cortinaland, meaning a long-needed sense of order is starting to emerge within Hayman’s online presence. The work of this kaleidoscopic and shape-shifting artist finally catalogued in one place.
But the crowning achievement of this mission is the release of an expanded edition of 2012’s The Violence. Among one of Darren Hayman’s most ambitious undertakings, The Violence is complex and emotionally resonant concept album centring on the English Civil War and the contemporaneous witch trials across East Anglia. With a sound brought to life by a vast ensemble of musicians going by the name The Long Parliament, the record digs right into the violence and superstitions of the period, tracing a country pulled apart by misplaced fervour, illusions of moral superiority, pernicious rumours and the old-fashioned desire for power. A society, that is, very different from our own, yet governed by familiar forces. One in which fear and ignorance curdle into something terrible, and act as a cover for those who wish to enact ideas of cruelty and greed. “The beliefs and fears that led to the Witch Trials are taken from the Puritan idea that it is wrong to glorify or look upon God’s image directly. Taken to its absolute extreme, only the blind were seen as truly pure, and ungodliness was perceived to be everywhere,” Hayman explains:
Evil never thinks of itself as such, and people can act cruelly when frightened. I assume that Matthew Hopkins, the self-named ‘Witch Finder General’ believed, on some level, that he was acting on God’s instruction. In early 1645, Hopkins pushed his ear to his window and overheard conversations between supposed witches. Elizabeth Clarke, a one-legged, 80-year-old widow, was the first to be accused and arrested.
Hopkins claimed that 3 days and nights of ‘watching’ led Elizabeth Clarke to ‘confess many things’; furthermore, that his interrogation witnessed the summoning of numerous hideous imps and demons. Clarke confessed to sleeping with the devil and also pointed the finger at other women in the parish, including Anne West and her daughter Rebecca. All of these women were single or widowed beggars and perceived to be a drain on their communities.
Hopkins began offering his services to other towns. For a fee, he would help rid these communities of their ‘witches’
The expanded edition of The Violence comes complete with its companion EP The Four Queens, plus several unreleased songs and demos. “It’s so important to me to have this record available again. It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked, and I believe it sounds like nothing else in my back catalogue,” Hayman explains. “I write easily about modernity and pepper my lyrics with slang, brand names, and colloquialisms. I wanted to write about something in Essex’s past that spoke of its strangeness and also forced me to write in a language suitable for another period.”
The Violence (Expanded Edition) is out now and available from the Darren Hayman Bandcamp page.
