St Ann’s, is a tribute to the council estate, on the edge of Nottingham city centre that defined David Boulter’s formative years:
“I was born in the old St Ann’s. Famously documented in the late 60s as some of the poorest social housing in England. Crumbling, cramped, and full of damp. We had a shared toilet in the backyard and no bathroom, some of the houses were without hot water, it was freezing cold in winter. Everything seemed black and white.”
By the late 1960s, St. Ann's, like many other city centre areas, had become run down and was earmarked by the council for slum clearance. 340 acres were bulldozed and 30,000 people including David's family were compulsorily uprooted. In 1970 the Victorian streets were replaced with a Radburn-style estate.
Here he talks to Clay Pipes’ Frances Castle, about his early years and the inspiration for the album.
Photo by Peter Garner
How do you feel about the 'old' St Ann's? You talk about black and white changing into colour. It must have been a relief for your family to finally have a bath and an inside toilet, but was there anything you missed about it as child?
I don’t think I missed anything for a long time. The joy of a brand new shiny house, with all the mod cons, was amazing. I remember within couple of years, walking down what was our street, trying to work out where our house had been, a sense of something odd. I was too young to understand really. The strange thing was, they knocked down almost everything. Hundreds of houses. Except a factory and a row of Alms houses that were at the end of our street. Seeing those, almost unchanged, and the complete destruction of everything else was strange. I started to think about people. My best friend from the old St Ann’s had moved to another part of Nottingham. We soon lost touch. And there was a sweet shop on the corner of our street I really missed.
You mentioned going to the Victorian School after having moved, and walking past all the old houses being knocked down on your way to school. It must have seemed as if your world was transforming in front of your eyes.
I guess as a child, you take things as they come a lot more. The old houses disappeared really fast. We moved into the new house in spring. By the time I went back to school after the summer holiday, all the streets around our old house had gone. You’d see odd buildings left standing that weren’t council property I guess. Pubs, the school. But soon everything was gone. One area, which I think had been a brickworks, was left derelict. It became an adventure playground. So again, that change turned positive for a child.
I stumbled on some old photographs by two people, Peter Garner and Peter Richardson. Seeing them was like stepping into a time machine. Memories came back I’d almost lost. I was probably 7 when we moved. A lot of those early memories were big things. Like my first Christmas memory. First day at school. It can be hard to connect to it without those surroundings intact. And my family didn’t take many photos. Especially not the details of our streets, our home.
As well as the move from the old St Ann's to the new one, I get the impression that the album is also about finally saying goodbye to the house you grew up in?
Besides the photos I mentioned. Going through my parent’s possessions, deciding what to keep. The memories attached to belongings. I guess I felt quite emotional. But also a feeling of who would remember. I wanted to express those feelings and also mark the moment. Being a musician, making a musical memory of it seemed a good idea. And maybe a way for me to put it in the past, to move on.
The response to your new LP at the Bandcamp listening party was really heart warming. Someone asked if it had been recorded in a professional studio, I know you work from a room at home. Your music always strikes me as beautifully recorded with a real attention to detail, I'm guessing you have learnt a lot over the years from recording with the Tindersticks?
These days recording at home can be on the same level as professional studios I guess. I have a couple of good mics. I use pro tools the same as any studio would. I don’t really record anything big. The loudest instrument I've recorded at home is a saxophone. Maybe that’s what makes my music more personal in some way. It becomes about me and my instruments and limitations.
When Tindersticks first began. The record company was always trying to get a known producer involved. We didn’t understand why they wanted to change the way we sounded if that’s what they liked about us in the first place. I think we always had a strong idea of what we wanted. Generally, with my music, once a sound or an instrument is established, everything else is a detail. I do have a problem focusing on details for too long sometimes.
Do you have any plans to play live again? it would be great to do another Clay Pipe night similar to the Cafe Oto event last year.
Yes, I hope to. It’s a shame not to do something around the release. But I really hope to get a plan together for next year. And would be very happy to be involved in any Clay Pipe-themed event. I’ve learnt a lot from the last show. Which is an odd thing to say after 30 years playing with Tindersticks. But playing solo is something very new, and a little scary for me.
The album is released on the 7th of June on CD/LP/Download. Vinyl copies are sold out directly from the label, but these shops still have pre-orders available: Juno, Resident, Five Rise Records, Rough Trade.
It’s a truly beautiful, melancholic but gently heartwarming listen, especially reading the details of how this music was inspired and the feelings that are brought about by reliving David’s childhood through these aural memories. And as usual with Clay Pipe it conjures up incredible feelings even if they’re not from my own life and that’s one of the things that I love so much about the albums your label releases….and this one is right up there with the best!