Tales of Colonsay - Double Audio CD from The Ciderhouse Rebellion and Jessie Summerhayes

 A gift for a parent, changing landscapes and seascapes, skeletal Cetacean remains and a new journey in spoken word inspire the latest work from Cider With Jessie, aka The Ciderhouse Rebellion with Jessie Summerhayes.

Tales of Colonsay will be released as a double CD along with a book featuring Jessie’s poems and illustrations on all platforms on 7th June.

Both Summerhayes and Grainger have been inspired by the landscapes of their surroundings in the past. Tales of Colonsay is the third collaboration with Summerhayes’ daughter Jessie - who is an award-winning poet and spoken-word artist, and the second in which a very specific landscape serves as the creative inspiration (the first being Ironstone Tales).

In this case the basis of the album is a collection of poetry Jessie wrote for her father’s birthday, inspired by one particular journey to and on the Inner Hebridean island of Colonsay. 11 tracks drawn from the landscape itself, tracking her movements from Oban, across the sea and then along the pristine Atlantic shoreline on Colonsay, culminating in the searing, blow-away track that is Hangman’s Rock.
There’s an intense reciprocity between the trio, even though they recorded the album in three separate rooms, with Jessie reciting the poems in one, while Grainger and Summerhayes improvised, weaving everything together to create an intricate and beautiful piece of work. “The words are the music and the music is the words and it’s an incredible inter-relationship of poetry to music that you don’t often come across,” says Grainger.

These poems are many things, a loving gift, a celebration of the love for a place, an echo of childhood wonder, a terrified vision of the wormholes in reality that lead only to decay and death, a clear-eyed view of the horror that human emotion can bring - a promise of nature’s revolution against our crimes … but, above all, they are heartbreakingly beautiful.


Jessie explains “these poems arose from movement, the first written on the ferry-crossing as a beloved and much visited island crept closer, the rest walking along the shoreline. The stories stepped out from the shifting landscape around me: gannets fishing in a stormy sea, tormentil on grassy slopes, or a washed-up whale’s whitening bones. Each poem is very much an expression of a particular moment in a particular space — they do not tell the tale of Colonsay’s coastline, they tell the tales it told me one week in July.”

Although organically created, with the music being written spontaneously, the album is structured from the original passage towards the island, then around and within it. Jessie continues “I arranged the poems into an order — starting with the ferry and Queen’s Bay, travelling northwards and eventually circling back around to the south-east coast. As I read the poems, the improvised music then continued the chain of storytelling, drawing on the descriptions and feelings caught in the poetry — as we performed together, the conversation continued, and that week in July was given another voice”

The Ciderhouse Rebellion’s Adam Summerhayes and Murray Grainger are known for their profound ability to create music spontaneously, with no prior planning nor conscious thought. It’s something they have been mastering for some years now, and are becoming increasingly recognised for. The album, with entirely improvised instrumentation and released on two CDs, continues their unique heritage and is their second album with the award-winning poet, whose work has been featured on BBC Radio 4.