Shovel Dance Collective: “It’s easy for us to tell our stories through these songs”

Flood warnings are in place across the UK and one of the nine members of Shovel Dance Collective has returned from a wet walk, their dog recuperating beside them. It feels appropriate to talk about water.

The Thames is the focal point of Shovel Dance Collective’s most recent offering, The Water is the Shovel of the Shore, released in December 2022 to growing acclaim. Consisting of four expansive tracks, each blending traditional song, improvisation, field recording and found sound, channelled through myriad sonic influences, it is less an album as we know it and more a cohesive coming-together of ideas. 

“Watery songs in watery settings,” banjo player Jacken Elswyth sums up, the settings proving as significant as the songs. “We’re often drafted in to play in some unusual places,” vocalist and organist Nick Granata says, and it was Granata and Mataio Austin Dean’s singing of ‘The Weary Whaling Grounds’ on the Thames’ foreshore that became the project’s impetus. “It’s a song about people who go whaling and wish they were back in Deptford. A song that happened to be in both Nick and Mataio’s repertoires and located in the place we were,” Jacken says. 

With the band resident in, but not originally from, London, there is a magical quality of discovery about the album: an admiration of place, as well as story and song. Pandemic lockdowns also nudged the project into being, with Elswyth making field recordings along the Thames during frequent walks. “Dan [S. Evans, guitarist, cellist and editor/producer] has spoken about feeling grounded by the foreshore during the lockdowns and the fact that the foreshore has a rhythm of its own, its exposure and then receding with the tide,” she says, acknowledging that in any other time, their relationship to the river would likely be different.

This is something that fascinates the nine-piece Collective: how folk song can transition between “the particular and the general,” offering meaning to both individuals and their personal circumstances, and the wider human condition. In their repertoire, and on the most recent album, Shovel Dance Collective have striven to tell the stories of lesser-heard voices. “It’s not been a matter of desperately digging for something that speaks to us,” Nick says. “It’s all there. It’s easy for us to tell our stories through these songs.” 

Folk and traditional music has been a relatively recent discovery for Granata. “It’s gone from nothing to ‘the most important thing,” they laugh. “I had no preconceptions of how a thing should be performed. I don’t treat the songs as precious or unmoveable, and that’s helped in shaping our sound.” 

There are others in the band like Granata whose “naïve passion” (their words) has proved a healthy, collaborative force with those in the ensemble who have enjoyed a lifelong relationship with folk music. But the criteria for joining the band – whose members also play in caroline and Gentle Stranger – was simple: “People who were doing interesting stuff,” Jacken says.

“There is a lot of talking, not a lot of playing,” Granata says of the Collective’s method towards arrangement. “Lots of opinions. That sounds difficult, but it makes it fruitful in the end.”

Read the review of The Water is the Shovel of the Shore

This interview originally appeared in the April 2023 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today