Personae

There is perhaps a word missing – ‘dramatis’ – from the title of the Dartmoor-based duo's fifth album, for they are fascinated by the extraordinary stories that the characters in these songs tell. In ‘The Knight's Ghost’ a grieving woman locks up the men who brought news of her husband's death in a cellar, until his ghost appears, appeals for their release and tells her fortune. ‘The Street of the Cats Who Dance’ explains why, in 1772, the port of St Malo stopped policing its curfew by releasing a pack of starved mastiffs into the streets. A forlorn woman recounts how her fiancée, a naval officer, made the fatal mistake of heading back to his ship, and came to an untimely end. The persona imaginatively revealing itself in ‘Old, Old, Old’ is Jonathan, the giant tortoise of St Helena. Aged 186, he is almost as famous now as the island's other renowned former resident, Napoleon, himself commemorated in the preceding track, ‘Boney's Defeat’.

These characters and their stories come to life in the expressive singing of Roberts and the assured, elegant and witty arrangements for guitar and piano. There are two songs that stand out as exceptional: ‘Independence’, in which a young person is navigating the passage from dependence to autonomy, and ‘Seasons’, depicting a life over the course of a year, with the loss that follows a final winter.