Last Night Watchman is the solo project of a UK songwriter who cut his teeth as one of the two guitarists in Birmingham indie outfit The Noseflutes, a band that recorded sessions for the BBC and released a run of EPs and albums during its run. After the group wound down, he kept writing on his own, and following a lengthy break from recording, he’s back with a new five-track EP called Old Blighty. His former Noseflutes bandmate John Horton, who performs under the name Sven Vortex, returns to contribute lead guitar and keyboard parts on the title track and the closing track, and is expected to feature on future releases as well.
Musically, the artist draws from a wide well of influence, pointing to songwriting greats like Neil Young and Paul Simon alongside boundary-pushing figures such as David Bowie, David Byrne, and Tom Waits. What ties those influences together for him is a fascination with how lyrics, music, and instrumentation can work in concert to build something closer to a musical essay than a straightforward song.
The New EP, “Old Blighty”
The EP was shaped in part by a more reflective stretch of life. Losing friends and family has a way of sharpening anyone’s sense of time and mortality, and that outlook, paired with the artist’s interest in history and science, runs through the record. It also comes through in some genuinely unusual subject matter. The title track, “Old Blighty,” was written in the wake of the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, using that moment to reckon with Britain’s own uncomfortable colonial history. John Horton’s lead guitar and keyboard work help round the track out. Elsewhere, “Footprints” takes a different route into deep time, inspired by the real discovery of 900,000-year-old human footprints preserved in a Norfolk riverbed, woven together with the artist’s reading on geology and the slow, ongoing reshaping of the planet’s mountains and seas. The EP’s closer, “Towards The Sun,” brings John Horton’s playing back in for the record’s final statement, closing the collaborative thread that opened on the title track.
The EP was recorded at a home studio the artist built after relocating to Herefordshire, a shift he’s welcomed after years of paying for studio time that didn’t always deliver the results he wanted. Working at his own pace hasn’t meant working loosely, though. The process leans on layered guitar and vocal overdubs, with banjo, ukulele, keyboard, and orchestral textures filling things out, and vocals in particular get the multi-take treatment on chorus sections, stacking takes to build a fuller, choir-like sound.
Old Blighty is shaping up to be a record unafraid to dig into heavy, sprawling subject matter, from colonial reckoning to deep geological time, all filtered through a homegrown, layered recording process. For more on the artist and the release, visit lastnightwatchman.com.
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