Jack Hayter: The Sisters of St. Anthony

Jack Hayter’s relationship with the Audio Antihero label continues with a series of twelve monthly singles, available by subscription. The first release, ‘The Shackleton’, is a beautiful thing, a bittersweet ballad sung in Hayter’s marvellously lived-in voice. It starts off as a  wryly observed story of a teenage relationship and the narrator’s unrequited crush on Sally Evans, who [it turns out] was much keener on Graham; but they are “two cold war kids on a horsehair mattress’, in the shadow of the bomb, and the song becomes a tale of equally unsatisfying relationships in the present day. It ends with the drone of the Avro-Shackleton, the noise that haunted those cold war kids as they listened to it “hunting the subs in the North East Atlantic”. This is superb storytelling – maybe it’s autobiographical, it doesn’t matter – with a perfectly evoked sense of time and place.

If these singles are all going to be this good, this is going to be a fantastic series. See what I mean below:

Jack Hayter – ‘The Shackleton’

Go and sign up for the series here – £4.99 for a dozen songs. Audio Antihero will also throw in the excellent Sucky Tart CD EP, reviewed here, for another couple of quid, which is a steal. And there’s a nice interview on Bubblegunked here, from which I gleaned the name of the Avro-Shackleton.

And here’s AAH stalwart Benjamin Shaw’s cover for ‘The Shackleton’:

We’ll be keeping an eye on this series over the next twelve months!

JKneale