Many years ago, I was a co-presenter on a local radio station’s arts show, and the second half of the program was built around a live, stripped-down music session by a mixture of local favourites and rising artists from the wider world. Hardly a Peel Session at Maida Vale but good enough for the good denizens of Swindon town. Many of the artists who featured have drifted from my memory, but Elles Bailey is someone I remember, not just for the music she gave us that day, which was, of course, sublime, but also because it was a lot of fun.
Well, enough of me trying to write my way into my own review (who do I think I am, Hunter S. flippin’ Thompson?), but since that day, perhaps a decade ago, I have enjoyed watching Elles’ career going from strength to strength.
Now, ahead of her new album, Can’t Take My Story Away, which will drop early next year and a run of big room gigs to support it, she gives us a first taste in the form of “Growing Roots.”
A neat blend of bluesy strut, and soul sophistication, she walks that fine line between roots traditions and forward-facing music making, between the funkily familiar and the fervently fresh, and it is glorious. Backbeats groove, basslines pop and pulse, guitars slide in and out, and the swell of the organ seems to gently wash through everything. Add a cool, unmissable but perfectly understated guitar break, and, of course, Elles’ unmistakable blend warm, smoke and seduction vocals, and you have the perfect argument for blues, soul, and roots music in general still being a vibrant force in the modern world.
“Growing Roots” might be a song about settling into a relationship, the calm and comfort that comes from finding the right person to share your life with, but it’s title could also, if you want to talk semantics, be taken to signal that roots music, for want of a better word, is, thanks to artists such as Elles Bailey, anything but stuck in the past. She is growing roots music indeed!
