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Mary Hampton

Hello there. I am Mary Hampton and I live in Brighton in a room overlooking the sea. I find old songs and keep them in coloured vials in my fridge. Sometimes I make up new songs. And sometimes I do neither one thing nor the other.

Mary Hampton Cotillion

Mary has brought together a live band of string and horn players known as the Mary Hampton Cotillion, featuring Alice Eldridge on cello (ViV, Collectress), Seth Bennett on double bass (7 Hertz, Orchestre Tout Puissant de Marcel Duchamp, IDST), Jo Burke on vocals and fiddle (Laish, Collectress, London Bulgarian Choir), and Alistair Strachan on horns and percussion (Sons of Noel and Adrian, ViV, Hamilton Yarns, Crayola Lectern).

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General Info

Genre: Experimental / Folk / Melodramatic Popular Song
Location Brighton, England, Un
Profile Views: 203924
Last Login: 1/16/2012
Member Since 8/18/2006
Website www.maryhampton.org
Record Label Navigator Records/ Teaspoon Records/ Rough Trade
Type of Label Indie
Bio
Hello there. I am Mary Hampton and I live in Brighton in a room overlooking the sea. I find old songs and keep them in coloured vials in my fridge. Sometimes I make up new songs. And sometimes I do neither one thing nor the other. <iframe width="560" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/jw-xPhdc0wI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> ...... If you would like to book me for a show, please contact me directly through this page. .... The new album 'My Mother's Children' contains a lot of the new songs. It is out on 4th August 2008..... "terrifying and gorgeous....unusual and strong.....epic and tiny... 'My Mother's Children' is an album I know I am going to love for life." (Eliza Carthy, fRoots April 08) .. .. "songs, which recline with shimmering sensuality in various shady cloaks of weirdness...fragility, desolation and humour...scurrying around Dartmoor under cover of darkness." (Colin Irwin, Telegraph, 26/04/08) .... "her bizarre flights of fancy are the dreams of children, far more unsettling for an adult.....evoking Eliot's Wasteland in it's beautiful bleakness". (Wyl Menmuir, Fly, June 08) .... "coffee-table-shattering purity...these are songs of unnerving delicacy, elemental and acoustic simplicity...potent and enchanting" **** (David Stubbs, Uncut, August 08) .... "brilliant..peculiar...how great the unexpected on this album makes me feel" (Kate Lewis, Acoustic Magazine, August 08) .... "...a true original.....Hampton's vocal lines are not so much melodies as weather systems" ***** (Clare O'Brien, Subba-Culture, May 08) .... Songlines **** (June 08) .... Mojo, Folk album of the month **** (August 08) .... The first two EPs contain more old songs and are available to buy below... .... "At a time when it sometimes seems that one cannot move for new folk, free folk, freak folk, weird folk, outsider folk and goodness knows what else, it's an unqualified joy to discover a collection of songs that sit proudly and uncomplicatedly within the folk tradition. And yet, while Mary Hampton's debut CD ... certainly derives much of its appeal from its appropriation of centuries-old folk idioms, it is certainly no museum piece. Its unearthly radiance and undercurrents of desolate modernity transform it into a vital and contemporary living document_" (Sound Projector, issue 15, 2007) .. ......Click here to buy:.. .... .... .... .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..
Members
Mary Hampton (voice, guitars, piano), Jo Burke (fiddle, voice), Alistair Strachan (horns, percussion), Seth Bennett (double bass), Alice Eldridge (cello, bass, electronics)
Influences
My peculiar kin, the postal service, the parks of London, weather, Anne Briggs, The Song of Solomon, Bob Dylan, Norwegian Hardinger fiddle music, Bach, birdsong, Gagaku, The Muppet Show, Fred Astaire, Blind Mamie Forehand, David Attenborough, pretty much anything published by Dover, William James, Erasmus Darwin, Kabuki, hormones, superstitions/ghost stories/jokes, Harpers journal of civilization, clockwork/bridges/fireworks, watching an Englishman dance, Homer, Rumi, Rabelais, Woolf, Beckett, Baudelaire, Thoreau, tobacco/tea/sugar, the well-made thing and its maker, the wind coming through my ill-fitting window, lists. ....
Sounds Like
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