The village hall in Maplebeck, Nottinghamshire, may be many things – its packed calendar of future events includes a yoga class, a book group, a wine tasting, and a day in which children can learn how to make poppies out of copper for Remembrance Sunday – but a regular stop on the nation’s gig circuit it clearly isn’t. You can tell by their notion of publicity. “Tickets are £10. Please will you start persuading people to come,” concluded the post on the village website announcing tonight’s show, perhaps a more plaintive approach to gig promotion than is usual.
Still, it seems to have worked. Inside, it’s standing room only, although the assembled crowd doesn’t seem much like the kind of audience that usually turn out for gigs by cult indie musicians once beloved of John Peel. A lot of them look around retirement age, and a few substantially older than that: a number have eschewed the beer and wine on offer in favour of cups of tea.
Nevertheless, Darren Hayman, whose gig it is, seems unfazed. His current musical project is called Thankful Villages, its name and inspiration taken from the term coined by writer Arthur Mee for those villages in Britain where all those who served in the first world war returned home alive: one of them was Maplebeck, making it a fitting launch venue.
Besides, performing in a village hall in rural Nottinghamshire seems strangely in keeping with the slightly esoteric nature of Hayman’s latterday career. In the 90s, he was the frontman of Hefner, a nervy-sounding, perpetually lovelorn indie band much adored by the aforementioned Peel, but since the band’s demise in 2002 his musical path has become ever more idiosyncratic, defined by a series of ambitious projects that blur music and research into odd, arcane corners of British history: albums based on 17th-century English civil war songs and on William Morris’s 1899 book of verse Chants for Socialists, a beautiful collection of instrumentals inspired by the various fates of Britain’s lidos, a trilogy of albums exploring different aspects of Essex’s past – from the rise of Harlow new town to the 16th-century witch trials.
He says he prefers being thought of as “a kind of British eccentric” to the image he had in Hefner, which he smilingly characterises as “why doesn’t that guy with the glasses get a girlfriend?”
“I think there was one review that said, ‘musician and historian Darren Hayman’, which of course massages my ego, it really flatters me,” he says. “But ultimately, even if I’m writing about the English civil war, I’m still interested in making records that are 45 minutes long and – in the limits of three- or four-minute songs – seeing how interesting or unusual you can make them, while it’s still essentially a pop song.”
Thankful Villages may well be Hayman’s most ambitious project yet. After reading Mee’s book series The King’s England, he came up with the idea of visiting all 54 villages and writing a song or a piece of music “either born there, or affected by my visit there”, as well as making a short film and a watercolour painting in each. “I liked the sound of the phrase ‘Thankful Villages’ and it appealed to ideas I have about randomness in music, about setting myself tasks. I thought the paintings and the films sort of proved that I was actually doing it,” he laughs. “I felt I could have just said I’d gone to 54 villages and written a song. So, in the first few, there’s quite a lot of footage of me with a guitar and a microphone.”
The idea set him off on a curious journey, that’s still ongoing: the 54 songs are to be split over three albums, the second due next year, the third in 2018. He’s been received in the villages with varying degrees of warmth, from places where his explanation about what he was up to was met with a certain froideur – “You occasionally get a slightly over-protective vicar who immediately goes, ‘I don’t think anyone here would want to talk to you’” – to places where the arrival of anyone, let alone a travelling musician, was greeted with excitement. In Culpho, Suffolk (population 40), Hayman was accosted by a woman who wondered what was going on because she heard a car stopping.
“One thing I’ve learned a lot about is the decline of the British village,” he says. “I was in East Norton in Leicestershire, and walking down the high street. You could see all the things the buildings used to be: the police station, the school, the Methodist chapel. The arrival of cars really changed things, and maybe the Beeching cuts to railways in the 60s. There’s been a rise in centralisation, there’s been a rise in the thinking that, rather than use a local amenity, it’s better to drive a short way to a clone town because then you’ll know what you’re getting, because it’ll have Tesco and Waterstones. And there’s a shortage of young people in villages.”
Even the villages that ostensibly seem to be thriving have problems: one of the Thankful Villages is Upper Slaughter in the Cotswolds, well-heeled and home to a luxury hotel with a Michelin-starred restaurant: “A lot of the villagers there were talking about the percentage of the houses that were non-residential, holiday homes.”
Whether you view it as an unwitting eulogy for a way of life or not, the music Hayman has come up with is impressive, not least in its diversity. Some of the tracks are abstract and littered with field recordings – what Hayman calls “wordless music that describes a sense of place” – while others are obviously raw and personal: “the mood of the first album goes up and down, because my marriage was breaking up while I was making it, and if you’re travelling for four hours on your own to visit somewhere, it does give you a lot of time to think.”
There are versions of local folk songs and instrumentals topped off with Hayman’s readings of Mee’s guidebooks and recordings of interviews with residents. In Stocklinch, Somerset, an 84-year-old called Ros – who approached Hayman with the winning line, “Would you like to come to my house for a cheese sandwich?” – talks about the “death” of one of the village’s two churches, while a resident of Cromwell in Nottinghamshire recalls a plane crash in a nearby river that killed a group of young air cadets in the mid-70s.
The project resembles a fascinating, occult history of the British countryside, filled with largely forgotten rural stories, not least the curious fact that many thankful villages initially chose to play down their good fortune. “Some even put up war memorials for people who were born in the village but lived somewhere else,” says Hayman. “It was like they wanted to be part of the collective grief that was a stage of the war, or they were worried about looking cowardly because no one died.”
Some tales Hayman has dug up are haunting and bleak: the funeral of four young boys killed in a lime kiln in the Dorset village of Langton Herring, “bourn to their graves by 18 children dressed in white”; a local farmer’s memories of the 1974 Flixborough disaster, when a chemical works exploded, killing 28 people, damaging 2,000 properties and – in his grimly matter-of-fact recollection – blowing severed limbs into the gardens of nearby houses. Others are comic, including the saga of Knowlton in Kent, which claimed to be “the bravest village in England” after winning a 1919 newspaper competition to discover the village that had sent the greatest proportion of its inhabitants to enlist in the first world war. They won a 17ft stone monument, but were later accused of fiddling the figures by including men who worked at a nearby manor house, but didn’t actually live in the village.
The crowd in Maplebeck lap that one up. In fact, however unlikely a gig venue the village hall initially appears, they seem genuinely captivated by Hayman’s performance: the hazily impressionistic films, his engaging introductions, the music – no matter how abstract it gets. It’s weird, says Hayman. He really struggled to get a record company interested in the whole idea, and, in fairness, you can picture the reaction of a label when Hayman bowled up, suggesting they release three albums of music about tiny villages linked by the fact that something didn’t happen there. But it’s ended up attracting an unexpected amount of attention from the kind of places that haven’t paid much attention to his previous projects. Local newspapers want to talk to him, as do Radio 4 and Radio 3.
Then again, his visits to thankful villages do keep unearthing fascinating stuff, even if it isn’t always as it seems. He visited Colwinston in Wales, where every New Year’s Day they play collyball, a sport that involves rolling swedes down a hill. “I’d researched it, and there was all this stuff about the ancient sport of collyball, how it had started with cauliflowers, but they disintegrated, so they used swedes. I thought: this is perfect. I was talking to a guy there and said, ‘How long have you been doing this?’ He said, ‘Oh, it started about four years ago’. But it said on the website that it was ancient. And he goes, ‘Oh, yeah, we just put that on the website. We thought that might get people in.’ Which I suppose it has.”
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