Guerssen/Restless Rec.
Penny Davies & Roger Ilott : Restless (AUS,1983)****
Penny Davies is of English/Welsh origin but in 1966 she moved with her family to Australia, singing British folk material at that time. Australian born Roger Ilott played first folk/country with The Rusty Dusty Bros, played with The Southern Road Band, and since 1976 with Penny in The Oak Road String Band, beside he was demanded session guitarist. The last band emerged to a trio and then a duo. Penny and Roger married in 1980, and started to develop their playing together and building up a repertoire of what should be songs with an inspiration in Australia and Australian folk music. Not only because modern Australian folk has roots in English folk, but also thanks to Penny’s gifted voice developing inspiration often in some troubadour kind of style, the songs have easy rhythmic folk-like melodies destined to be remembered well, are in a typical English fashion and these also have a certain sad beauty because of this. The home studio recording, which was a recording session process, before they ever tried anything out live, with use of multi tracking in the vocal parts, accidentally, because of the close harmony work on them; often reveal something common or reminiscent of Mellow Candle, while certain other tracks, through Penny's voice colour qualities, and the music it's folk associations, sound something like a simplified folkrock version of Trees, as like expressed into a full-range-duo format. The guitar arrangements as well as the voice have a perfectly balanced feedback that creates a very warm atmosphere, in combination with a spacey-timeless effect on the vocals (again I refer here to Mellow Candle). Just here and there you can hear how Roger learned guitar from listening to the Byrds (besides Lovin’Spoonful and Buffalo Springfield), even bringing in, just here and there, that slightly eastern tinged “8 miles High” Byrds touch. Some of the harmony vocals differ a bit more, especially when sporadically Roger sings, it has slightly different vocal arrangements, sounding more like something going towards other folkpsych inspirations from late ‘60’s. One track, the cynical song “To Many Fish” should make people blush now, because at the times of inspiration or insight, of realization of some changes move into false directions, it seems that for our future, which is now, not enough is done about it, so that such a song like this was destined to become prophetic, because nowadays fish became rare and poisonous in Sydney bay.
The duo started their own label in 1982 and printed 500 copies of their studio album. They never thought about re-releasing their debut album, but collector’s interest and interest from Guerssen Records luckily made them decide to do so. And this truly is a wonderful album, which I can recommended especially to fans of Trees and Mellow Candle and the likes. Think about that this is mostly self-penned (and not traditional) material.
The extra additional material of five demo version songs gives an idea of the duo’s creative process, something which is still revealed in these more roughly recorded versions.
