Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
OLD WIVES’ TALE THE INSPIRATION FOR DOCUMENTA RELEASE
IT’S one of those local history stories that has passed into folklore and intrigued and terrified kids for as long as anyone can remember – the strange case of Margorie Mccall, who lived once and was buried twice. The Lurgan woman, it’s claimed, was laid in the sod after seeming to succumb to a fever only to be roused by a grave robber as he tried to prise a ring off her finger. The story goes that when the poor woman returned home her doctor husband John dropped dead on the spot from shock, though Margorie lived on into old age. The headstone, reportedly dating from around 1705, is in Shankill cemetery in the Co Armagh town to this day. It’s almost certainly bullshit, based on a common European folklore theme, but what the heck - it’s a great story, and one that frightened the bejesus out of my brother and me as we sat on our oul granny’s knee (she was from the Orchard County). What’s more it’s the perfect inspiration for an EP by Belfast band Documenta. The psych-rock lone-furrow ploughists have taken a break from their planned Drone Pop album trilogy to release Lady With The Ring which is available to stream. It starts with a sort-of narrated instrumental (if that makes sense) in the style of a court report read by Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized collaborator Will Carruthers. It’s the perfect introduction to the story, whose startled anti-hero is a “tramp of disreputable character with a reckless and thieving disposition”. There’s a nod in style, methinks, to Madness’s concept album The Liberty of Norton Folgate at least in the narrator’s London drawl delivery. If the title track is decidedly jaunty for such macabre subject matter, The Blue Sleep is a dreamlike joy, this time imagined from Margorie’s perspective, at once haunting and ecstatic, while It’s Quiet Now and Jack Morbus seem to descend ever more into the murky depths of the underworld. It’s dark stuff, but like death itself, inevitably irresistible. Final track The Fullness of Years is a sort of epilogue, again told by Carruthers, that’s synth organ-led and the perfect bookend to Margorie’s strangest of lives. Like we said before, the tale is probably nonsense. But the music it inspired is anything but... Lady With The Ring is available to stream on Soundcloud now and will be released on all formats through Touch Sensitive Records this day week. Go and dig it.