Mark Harrison Band

Mark Harrison has been on the Blues scene for around 10 years now, and I have seen him playing as a solo performer, in a duo, trio and even five piece, but this is the first album he has released under the moniker of the Mark Harrison Band and the result definitely has the feel of a band rather than that of a solo musician with added sessioneers.

The band is Harrison himself, drummer and percussionist Ben Welburn and Charles Benfield on double bass, guitars, mandolin & piano and it was all produced, mixed and mastered by Benfield.

Mark Harrison is a unique songwriter and singer in that he is writing very much in the style of the old Blues and folk singers – he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre, especially the old travelling Bluesmen of the pre-electric era, and often writes in the style of a Skip Taylor or Lightning Hopkins but his performance is always tempered by a flat Coventry accent, rooting the music in the here and now. He plays a National resonator, 12 string guitar and – very occasionally – electric guitar, as well as his vocals and wrote all 21 songs here.
And so, to the music.

21 tracks spread over 2 CDs and every one an acoustic delight.
Harrison tells stories and there is something in every song to tell a tale or illuminate the human condition. The songs stem from various points in his musical history – many of them have been played live for years – but they have a real fresh feel to them. In conversation with Mark, he told me that the recording process was for the three band members to play ‘live’ in the studio with only a few retakes and very little redubbing. He said that he felt that recording with the others, rather than in a booth and listening on headphones, improved the way his vocals integrated with the band and, from my position, he really seems to have reproduced the same sort of environment he manages playing live. A lot of credit must go to Charles Benfield for a delightfully clean and focused production.

Harrison is a keen observer of lot of humanity, in ‘Passing Through’ he describes the activities and emotions of the mass but from the position of an external observer – contract worker - while ‘Club Of Lost Souls’ has him intimately part of those dislodged or discarded from the core – redundant.

One of the standout tracks is ‘Toolmaker’s Blues’ which harkens back to his upbringing in Coventry, once the manufacturing heartbeat of the UK but now with the factories silenced, with the heartbreaking refrain of “How can you be a toolmaker when nobodies buying tools?”
It feels to me that the second CD has more of a classic Blues feel to I, the themes more ‘personal’ in many ways but the songs on both CDs are equally listenable and the album is one that has really kept me listening as I’ve been through a good few times just for the pleasure of it.

Mark Harrison is a unique, and very British, songsmith, and the band he has around him create a wonderful sound that perfectly matches his exquisite lyricism.
A really great album.