"The true star of a stage positively brimming with quality. Authentic, unpretentious and lightened by Ms Dadd's loveable persona, the bands etheral folk seduced an audience already spoilt with highlights. Sumptuos harmonies, pastoral melodies and banana grins abound." Venue Magazine July 2006
"Hopefully this LP will be filled with the same kind of magical, bewitching tunes as Føroyar , with vocal hooks that send thrilling shivers sprinting across your nerve endings and sink you into those hot joyful flushes that only come with the experience of something quite unique". Stool Pigeon Nov 2004
"For beneath Dadd's ever-beaming, amiable exterior lies the author of a deft, charismatic brand of folk music", John Stevens, Venue Magazine
Back On The Tracks October 2006
Album Review in Venue Magazine December 2006
Gig review published in the Stool Pigeon, nov 2004
Article in Venue Magazine October 2004
Preview in Venue Magazine 2004
Review of the Carpenter EP 2004
Article in Logo Magazine April 2003
Ear To The Ground, Logo April 2003
Some quotes about Whalebone Polly
Back On The Tracks October 2006
I’m not a big fan of live albums. Mostly they’re not much more than concert souvenirs for the terminally nostalgic and, truth to tell, most artists sound much better on CD than they do in real life. Don’t get me wrong though, because I love the sights and smells and interactions and mistakes and vibes of live gigs. For sheer listening pleasure, however, I’ll usually take the studio versions
This is something else again. Rachael Dadd, best known to me as a mainstay of the eccentric folksy trio Whalebone Polly, has taken a bunch of her previously recorded songs plus a couple of new ones and performed them live, with no audience, in the crypt of St Paul’s Church in Bristol. Not only does she make superb use of that space’s warm acoustics, but she re-interprets the songs with a whole lot of input from The Missing Scissors, an ensemble that includes harp, clarinet, violin, melodica, cello and trumpet – a splendid palette of musical colours, textures and timbres with which to adorn her material.
It feels, even on the old songs, like an entirely new album, with Dadd’s lyrics and melodies heard from a new perspective. Also, she’s become more familiar with these songs, so her delivery of the beautifully lilting Foroyar, for example, is noticeably more assured. Of the two songs I haven’t heard before, Birds & Horses, swathed in plucky harp and finger-picked acoustic guitar, is as tender and delicate as we’ve come to expect of Dadd, while the closing Swan Song is as light as a feather floating through a sun-dappled forest glade
To the best of my knowledge, nobody else is making records of this sort at the moment. If I had to try to catch the essence of what Dadd (and Whalebone Polly) does, I’d have to say that if Shakespeare’s fairies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream were to form a group in emulation of the Incredible String Band, it might sound a bit like this.
Songs From The Crypt is a CD to restore your faith in the simple virtues of a good song performed with honesty and sincerity. Dadd’s deliciously meandering melodies, beautifully embellished by The Missing Scissors, are immediately enchanting, but they also get better with every subsequent listen.
Ok, so there's no frills lo-fi recording. Below that, there's even no fi. But that still leaves us a little lacking in shorthand journalese, to be honest, when it comes to descricing an album recorded ia back garden. Which is just as well, for 'Summer...' is deserving of a little expansive comment. The setting is as complementary as had the Birthday Party been recorded in an iron foundary, the birdsong and dog barks the perfect backdrop to a sound so pastorally folksy one imagines a well-thumbed copy of 'Lyrical Ballards' being read aloud between takes. Just voice - part intimately converational, part Mitchell-esque breathy elasticity - and acoustic guitar and the occassional burst of harmonica, it boasts a winning self confidence in the songwriting, detailing love and life's minutae with equal clarity. If we must live without Whalebone Polly for a while as Kate Stables continues her Parisian Sojourn, this third of that fine trio has given us something mighty fine to cling to in the meantime.
Dadd's the Word. Article in Venue Magazine October 2004. Words by John Stevens
Sometimes the truth of the matter is the leaset important detail. For example, persual of the website devoted to the musical activities of Ms Rachael Dadd leads to a curious anecdote: one night, school folk singer/songwriter woke to find a frog , of all things, in her hand, of all places. "It felt like the sort of thing that happens at the beginning of an epic novel or film," concludes the quirky vignette, and meeting Dadd in person one is happy for fantasy and reality to blur, to imagine this magnetically cheerful and approachable young woman instinctively puckering up to the intrusive anphibian and , as tradition dictates, landing herself a bona fide Prince Charming.
The truth, while a secondary concern, somewhat deflates such quixotic idealism: "I was dreaming that there was something on my pillow, and then that it moved to my hand. I woke up, and , to my horror, discovered this slimy, wriggling thing in my palm. It leapt under my bed and eventually I found it dead from dehydration."
Lovely. This unexpectedly grisly tale serves as warning that appearances can be deceptive (although not, one presumes, in the case of the late frog). For beneath Dadd's ever-beaming, amiable exterior lies the author of a deft, charismatic brand of folk music that, while never professing to challenge Bristol's prince of darkness Gravenhurst in the art of wilfully spraying pastoral musical terrain with caustic lyrical pesticide, carries a subtle sting all of its own. Take 'Swimming for Gold', a breezy, beautifully played ditty from recent EP 'The Carpenter', which carries amidst its delicately plucked finery the ominous caveat that "There are sharks, sharks as big as houses in the water".
Elsewhere, a live rendering of 'Open The Floodgates' finds Dadd in strident, adrenalised form: "I've had enough of being timid...I want it all," she declares, and you wouldn't argue for a second. "Most of my songs are completely personal, and I'm always writing from my own perspective. With some of my newer songs I'm trying to combine that with wider political and social issues: for example, the song 'The Carpenter' is about my dad, but also about the fact that, as a society, we're increasingly enslaved to work. It's just a result of getting older and becoming a bit more observant."
So where and over how long a period was this confidence of songcraft and delivery honed? "I grew up in Farnham, Surrey, where there's not really anywhere to play gigs. I starting properly gigging when I moved to Winchester, playing at The Railway Inn and also The Joiners in Southampton. But I came to Bristol having heard great things about the music community here - there are so many more opportunities than the places I have lived before, and it's so much friendlier than London."
A familiar story. Having relocated herself, Dadd is now ready to place personal and musical roots in the city, with the arrival of her boyfriend, Sam, to study music precipitating the coming to fruition of a long held plan. "Sam has had this idea for a collective called Cleaner Records, where we and a load of friends from Winchester play on each other's stuff, and put on events. Now just seems like the perfect time to do it. We're going to put on nights and put together a compilation. It'll be fairly low key to start with, but there's so many good little places to do this sort of thing in Bristol, it just seems ideal."
Another of the Cleaner contingent Kate Satables, with whom Dadd performs in Whalebone Polly, a more textured, countrified proposition altogether: if her own material evokes the more established female folk reference points of Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos and Beth Orton, Whalebone Polly - replete with new finish recruit Virpi on Violin - calls to mind a host of less established but equally worthy reference points, with echoes of the delicate, intelligent arrangements and close-knit harmonising as US leftfield players like Tara Jane O'Neil and Nina Nastasia. Dadd's excitement at the potential of this burgeoning group project - as well as the effect it has on her solo work - is obvious: "It's changed the way I think about the songs. Playing with other people really moves you on in new directions. Musically, it's pretty distinct from what I do on my own: Kate plays the banjo, all three of us do harmonies, and generally having more instruments to experiment with makes the sound and atmosphere of the music very different."
Up next for them is a support slot with feted Fife Folk merchant James Yorkston (The Cube, 15 October), while Rachael Dadd herself is preparing for a debut mini-album release on Snowstorm, the home of Isobell Campbell (Belle & Sebastian), Kathryn Williams and Candidate. "My favourite stuff was recorded live in the gardenin Winchester. You can hear all the background noise: a plane flying past, a bee buzzing across the microphone, dogs start barking in the distance"...and maybe, if you listen close enough, the sound of a thirsty frog croakingits last.
Gig review published in the Stool Pigeon, nov 2004
... they were more than content to listen to Winchester expat Rachael Dadd, another precious, not to mention precocious, talent. In amongst her set of perfect pop songs she plays Sweetest in the Land , a song she more usually performs as part of Whalebone Polly, who have Glastonbury, Shambala and Truck Festival appearances ahead of them. Rachael has her own plans; a September tour and her own album, out on Cleaner Records. Hopefully this LP will be filled with the same kind of magical, bewitching tunes as Føroyar , with vocal hooks that send thrilling shivers sprinting across your nerve endings and sink you into those hot joyful flushes that only come with the experience of something quite unique. She's a busy girl, so as Francois and the Atlas Mountain Ensemble rearranged the room Rachael might have been forgiven for heading to the bar. "...er, Rachael..."
"Oh, sorry! Do I play on this?"
"Yes, you play the coconuts."
Rachael Dadd, 'The Carpenter EP', Press Release, Polarbear PR, Janury 2004
Beauty. It can stop you dead. Leave you breathless. Swell the senses. Even render you weak at the knees. In music it can arrive and deprt in the twinkle of a key change or the crackle of a held note, fixing you firm and igniting new flames. It's the sole component of contemporary music tht cannot be feigned, or carved out from influences old. It's the most precious of musical gifts and the most intricate to fully embrace. It's 'The Carpenter EP'. It's Rachael Dadd.
'The Carpenter' is the debut EP from Bristol-based singer songwriter Rachael Dadd. Featuring five self-composed, self-recorded songs it marks the arrival of a uniquely gifted young talent.
Nothing more, nothing less than a young girl and her battered six-string. 'The Carpenter EP' is the creative outpouring of a confessional young voice through an absorbing collection of rolling pop melodies and gentle folk stylings. From the vulnerable, looping title track by way of the spine-chilling love song 'No Sleep in the Meadow' and the honest vulnerability of 'This Whole Town', Rachael Dadd revels in quiet understatement, drawing poetry from a subtle web of freshly formed emotions.
Although bearing the influential marks of Blue-era Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake 'The Carpenter EP' casts Rachael Dadd as an artists penetrating virgin territory, looking beyond mere influences to a sound that the young soloist has made her own. Absorbing and enthralling it's Rachael Dadd's starkly confessional narrative - concerned with so much more than mere love odes - that sets her apart from her contempories. Through crisp acoustica and a delightfully warm range she articulates openly about parental regrets ('The Carpenter') and all manner of reflctive themes without burdening the listener with even a hint of word-weariness. It's a truly engaging, and humbling spectacle, that when coupled with her looping melodies and incandescent folk makes for a beautiful, breath-taking musical gift.
'The Carpenter EP' is the first drop in the ocean of musical creativity that promises to herald an illustrious future for Rachael Dadd. Beauty has not sounded so good nor threatened to leave you fighting for breath, in a very very long time.
"The most noise conveying the least information" remarked Quentin Crisp, commenting on music's destinctly ambiguous charm. Glancing around the current musical landscape you can't help but feel that maybe the iconoclastic old queen had a point.Whether it's the substanceless chest thumping of The Datsuns' 'Harmonic Generator' ("it's about our amp, maaan!") or the pretty self explanatory lure of D4's 'Rock'n'Roll Motherfucker' more noise pretty much means less...well, meaningful content if truth be told. A bad thing? Maybe not, but then again it's always nice to discover someone looking to buck the trend.
Hazadously timid singer-songwriter Rachael Dadd deals in simplicity. Not the 'simplicity' that suggests a reliance on battilions of amps to drown out any dissenters or a dependence on bloodcurdling wails to cover up severe musical inadequacies, oh no. This is the simplicity that implies stripped down acoustic fragility, lonesome pianos and a voice as naked as the day it was born. In other words a simplicity that means intimacy and a minimilism that suggest musical purity over shameless excess.
"You needn't be brash and raucous to convey passion. Its's perhaps just...easier", Rachael says before ducking back behind her pint. "Passion can come through warmth just as easily, take Joni Mitchell, her song writing is so individual, so clever and intuitive, that it's also the most passionate music in the world, and that comes across soley through the warmth of her lyrics".
Shivering earnestly in the acoustic breeze, Rachael's music draws heavily from the Joni Mitchell camp, evoking the much admired confessional mannerisms and innocence that Mitchell looked to distance herself from after the universal success of 1971's Blue. Forthright and poetic, it's Rachael's folk flushed vocals that snare instantly, threading through every exposed arrangement - each etched with a tale of love and/or loss that wobble and shuffle like selfconcious teenage lovers.
Having flirted with Oxfordshire's vaunted independent, Truck Records, harvesting a wealth of knowlege from founder Robin Bennett, Rachael's stock has recently risen drastically. Happy to take to the stage armed simply with a battered acoustic guitar and a locker stuffed with amourous tales and feather light melodies, Rachael's understated approach extends beyond mere musical production.
"Playing solo I have a lot more freedom. I can just book a gig and turn up - get on the train with my guitar and play. I really feel like nothing is holding me back - it's just me, and not having to rely on others is really quite liberating. I never felt completely comfortable with a band - it's just not me".
Like the legions of female singer songwriters that have gone before - Ani Difranco, Tori Amos, Gemma Hayes to name but a few - Rachael Dadd is a simple young woman, unassuming and old beyong her years, but remember it's always the quiet ones that you have to watch.
LOGO April 2003
Matt Brown
Review of The Carpenter EP by Nick Ellerby, Mid HantsObserver, November 2003
I was impressed with this self produced EP even before I took it out of its sleeve to play the damn thing. This is because Rachael has taken the time to put together a neat little package. The hand designed cover incorporates the track titles, a few carefully chosen images and graphics, recording information, credits and a selected lyric. You also receive a paper chain of one of the cover images and a selection of small black and white photographs from her life. Attention to detail, that's what we music fans like to see. It's plain to see that a lot of thought has gone into this five track demo before you've even heard a note.
Having seen Rachael perform several times I knew I wasn't going to be disappointed with the songs on offer here. What I wasn't prepared for was how much I enjoyed her intimate performance on the disc. How many times have you been excited by a live performance to buy a copy of the artists work only to be disappointed by the lack of vitality upon the first 'home listen'. I'm happy to say that this is certainly not the case with Rachael's material. The first four tracks are recorded on her own machine in her bedroom and garden and the fifth is a live effort from the joiners arms in Southampton. The warm acoustic guitar sound provides a great bed for this woman's vocals to lie and stetch out on. Her voice is simply superb here, on every track it ebbs and flows carrying her competent lyrics smoothly over her music. Rachael sings of family love, drugs, herself and even Winchester itself. Every track on 'The Carpenter EP' impressed me immensely. The Jeff Buckley-esque title song, the stark and beautiful 'No Sleep in the Meadow' (my particular favourite), the heartfelt and compassionate 'Swimming for Gold', the lyrically lead 'This Whole town' and the fiery and candid 'Open the Floodgtes' are all excellently performed bytes of folk-tinged, acoustic songwriting. The whole affair sounds distinctly English, which is definitely a good thing as far as I'm concerned. Her work calls to mind female solo artists as Tori Amos, Beth Orton and Joni Mitchell.
The songs on offer are instantly enjoyable and also get better with a few listens as is the way of great songs. I've found this to be an album best listened to in the morning. The melodies will soothe a sore head and the songs are repeatedly good enough to reflect on if you haven't been killing brain cells the previous evening. It has also managed to replace the Flaming Lip's 'Yochimi Battles the Pink Robots' as the soundtrack to my Sunday lie-in.
I suggest you all head down to www.rachaeldadd.co.uk and send the good lady a fiver and get hold of a copy of this sweet litle number. You never know, it may be worth something a few years down the line.
Preview In Venue Magazine, Bristol 2004
Chances are, if your formative years are spent in deepest surrey, with the place you call home known as Walnut tree Cottage, you're rather likely to grow up to become a folk singer. And one versed in delicately-played tuneage of the starkly confessional variety at that.
Rachael Dadd did. After a fashion, anyway.......
Flash forward a decade or so - post new musical discoveries, post studying at the Winchester School of Art, and post initial cd releases - and we find Rachael now resident in Bristol. And, it has to be said, picking up quite a following. Logo Magazine for instance, who reacted to her truly lovely 'The Carpenter' EP thus: 'stripped down acoustic fragility, lonesome pianos and a voice as naked as the day it was born. In other words a simplicity that means intimacy and a minimilism that suggest musical purity over shameless excess.'
Meanwhile in bow meets extra string developments, the singer has also teamed up with fellow musician Kate Stables to form the equally vaunted Whalebone Polly, an experi-outfit big on harmony and, indeed, the oft neglected banjo, melodica and clarinet.
Profile: Rachael Dadd. Decode Magazine. Words Stuart Dyer. November 2004
It is perhaps unsurprising, considering the current political climate of the world, that there is an abundance of music around at the moment that attempts (often too hard) to make a bold statement about humanity. In such an atmosphere I found it refreshing to hear, in Rachael Dadd, a singer/songwriter delivering songs that are honest reflections of her experiences and observations of simple, every day life.
Rachael began writing songs when she was thirteen, in her hometown Farnham in Surrey, inspted by childhood idol Tori Amos. Initially Rachael experimented with writing songs on her piano, but the music she produces today comes more commonly in the modest, natural form of Rachael's delicate harmonies accompanied by acoustic guitar. Rachael's music is often made up of gentle, melodic guitar riffs building to more upbeat choruses that inspire a considerable amount of foot tapping -- it's not to be dismissed as just another collection of 'nice' sounds to slap on as background noise. Rachael's songs will not allow you to do so. Each one has its own quality that commands you to stop everything you are doing and allow yourself to be transported into Rachael's magical world. The most enthralling aspect of Rachael's songs is her thoughtful and deeply emotive lyrics which transform simple topics like relationships and growing up, in to fascinating accounts of adventure and emotion. rachael is also not afrsid to tackle more delicate and contentious issues -- always combining gentle melody and acutely thoughtful words to surround even such topics as drug abuse with the general feeling that everything will be ok. The lyrics are suggestive rather than didactic; you find yourself tuned in tightly, as carefully selected phrases point outto new dimensions where things may become infinitely more interesting and optimistic. Ocassionally, Rachael delivers darker, more commanding moments, promising for example to come 'Riding in wearing black lace" when she is 'brave enough to leave this beautiful place".
Rachael spent three years at art college and is also an eager producer of her own art-work. Like her lyrics, rachael's illustrations are ponderous and deliberate, and can be seen on the at her website as well as the sleeves of her CDs. The simple but effective drawings are perfect accompaniment to her music. Rachael also made use of her three years in Winchester by performing more live music, including six months as keyboad player for promising rock and roll act, Fleeing New York. Playing more regular dates in Bristol, several appearances at Truckfest, and even busking in Bath -- Rachael is a comfortable and confident performer, who always recieves excellent response from the crowds. Local act and good friend Kate Stables joins Rachael to make up the intriguing new act, Whalebone Polly. Rachael and Kate combine delicate harmonies with Rachael's guitar and Kate's banjo riffs to deliver a sound that is at times gospel, at times bluegrass and other times folk, but always intensely thoughtful. Whalebone Polly sounds like the soundtrack to a beautiful, epic romance, and gives Rachael the chance to enjoy a wider variety of instruments such as her first love, the clarinet. Rachael dadd is a beuatiful, peotic explorer of music in both its recorded and live forms. She is looking forward to further explorations when, in the coming months, she records a Whalebone Polly album and a solo album on Snowstorm records. her ambitions are simple: She wishes to continue producing thoughtful work that conjures seductive imagery and make extaordinary observations of exra ordinary human life.
Some quotes about Whalebone Polly
"The winners, though, were Whalebone Polly, slowly filing the voluminous acoustic tent to the brim from a lunchtome standing start with a set of exquisite beauty. Quite how Bristol should reward their endeavours is open to debate. Personally, we'd suggest a Saddam-style toppling of Edward Colston's statue and a bronze depecting three women done up in their Sunday best in its place." (VENUE)
"Were Milton alive today, he could not conceive a more holy trinity nor lyricise the sweetness of sin so completely as these beautiful, charming, open young women." (THE FLY)
"Enthralling, thoughtful an deeply emotive." (DECODE MAGAZINE)
"If ever you could describe a gig as pretty, this would be it." (GIGWISE)
