Saturday 26 January 2019, 7.30pm
The daughter of a coal miner, weaving a trail from West Virginia to Texas and now residing in Scotland, Heather Leigh furthers the vast unexplored reaches of pedal steel guitar.
Her playing is as physical as it is phantom, combining spontaneous compositions with a feel for the full interaction of flesh with hallucinatory power sources. With a rare combination of sensitivity and strength, Leigh’s steel mainlines sanctified slide guitar and deforms it using hypnotic tone-implosions, juggling walls of bleeding amp tone with choral vocal constructs and wrenching single note ascensions.
New album 'Throne', out on Editions Mego, is a suite of heartbleed ballads cauterised with burning riffs. After the rawness of its precursor I Abused Animal, Throne is a record of late night Americana and heavy femininity; intimate love songs smoked in sensuality. The songs on Throne are woozy, gorgeous and uncomfortable, smothered in thick layers of bass but lifted by multitracked vocals. These are rich song forms that stand in contrast to the stripped down steel in her duo with Peter Brotzmann. It is an album of cosmic echoes, abstractions and introspection, of characters and stories that make up Leigh's first best pop record, its melodies and hooks set alight with the fiery core of her unique and distinctive pedal steel.
Simon Fisher Turner is renowned for his film soundtrack work which began in collaboration with Derek Jarman, for whom he scored many feature films, from Caravaggio (1986) through to Jarman’s final work Blue (1993). Caravaggio began a long relationship with the BFI, with Fisher Turner composing the score for restorations of three silent films, Un Chant D’Amour (dir. Jean Genet, 1950), The Great White Silence (dir. Herbert Ponting, 1924), and The Epic of Everest (dir. Captain John Noel, 1924), for which he won a prestigious Ivor Novello Award. His most recent work, A Quiet Corner in Time (2020), is a collaboration with the ceramist and author Edmund de Waal.
Jennifer Lucy Allan is a writer and researcher. She is currently working on a PhD at CRiSAP (UAL) on the social and cultural history of the foghorn, and is also a freelance music journalist specialising in underground and experimental music. Previously she was online editor for The Wire, and now freelances for The Wire, The Quietus, The Guardian and others. She runs the reissues label Arc Light Editions with James Ginzburg, and is a core member of Laura Cannell’s Modern Ritual Collective. She has recently guested on BBC3’s Late Junction, and written a series on life living in a lighthouse for Caught By The River.
