John Villiers - A Different Circus

A Different Circus:

John Villiers writes about his latest ITR release, A Different Circus:

“Well, it’s been a strange twelve months or so for all of us. Coming up with three albums and not being able to play them live anywhere or even get together and form a band to try out the ideas, has been  increasingly frsutrating as we’ve gone along. Writing and putting together A Different Circus has been odd for reasons of its own, as well. Having settled into the instrumental thing with both Pastoral and Unsung, I really hadn’t been expecting to write songs with lyrics and vocals anytime soon. Let alone play different instruments, to boot! My focus was on a set of 12-string instrumentals. I’d bought the guitar, worked up a few ideas and demos was getting ready to do something with them, having learnt the basics on the thing: ‘you spend half the time tuning it….and the other half playing out-of-tune‘, as someone once said.

“Despite having a dozen or so 12-string prospects, the next thing that turned up was clearly a song intro (to Isolation Blues, as it turned out) rather than an instrumental. Lyrics swiftly followed along. By breakfast it was done and I posted a ‘solo’ version up on YouTube the day after – just me and the guitar. Assembling an animated video with whatever I had around at the time went up over the weekend – quickest result I’ve ever had! After that another idea appeared. Best follow it…and sure enough another turned up shortly afterwards. And that’s how the album came about!

“Almost all the songs were written that way and the first half is laid out in the order they arrived. Fine by me that they sequenced themselves. I wanted to keep the acoustic feel I’d been working on the past year, with most written in a common open tuning, but just opening up the sound to include a few more instruments. A couple of older tunes suggested themselves and one of them, Dear Sister, I  felt was due for a proper recording on the album – plus, it gave me a welcome break from coming up with a new song for a fortnight! The other one I used was Riding In The Country, an instrumental that originally appeared on Unsung, my last album…

“However, the other odd thing about the tunes, aside from arriving like an unexpected guest on a rainy night, was the odd context. There are probably loads of musicians and writers out there with the same dilemma: all stuck indoors, writing songs about everyone being stuck indoors! How do we differentiate our stuff from each other’s? It’s not a problem when you write instrumentals, not that I’ve noticed, anyway. Keep it fresh? Best just ignore it, I decided. On the basis that loads of songwriters have been in love, say, at least they claim to have been anyway, we can still tell their songs apart so it shouldn’t be too difficult here, either! A common situation, the fears and frustration, the trials and tribulations of being in isolation through the never-ending month of Sundays that was 2020, and on into the next year as well. In my case, these are mostly songs about escape and getting away and the ones that aren’t are probably about loss – so that’s pretty much my standard song palette right there…

“As a collection, I’ve tried to keep it upbeat – other people write ‘misery’ much better than I do. Coming from a blues music background, I wanted the songs to express hope rather than wallow in the general crapness of the time and besides, following raggedly far behind in the footsteps of great writers like Sam Cooke I wanted to write simply not simplistically, at least not witlessly. Infusing the tunes with country and folk influences and a love of that short-lived but great period of English country-blues, kick-started by The Band that inspired the work of Ronnie Lane, Rod Stewart, Lindisfarne, McGuinness-Flint and Gallagher & Lyle and others, was just the impetus I needed!

“So here it is, A Different Circus. turn it up and check it out…”