TRACK REVIEW: Follow – Home Beyond the River

This is a caring tribute to James Crozer, a reclusive, benevolent chemist who worked in Victorian Newcastle, and Joe Barton’s debut solo release follows in Crozer’s footsteps, with all of its proceeds going to The People’s Kitchen.

Of the very few possessions he was found to have in his cottage when he died in 1888, some were musical boxes, and this humble and thoughtful instrument leads the piece. It is a near six-minute walk through somewhere quietly colourful and completely peaceful, joined by lamenting strings. The strings slowly break away at the end of the piece to leave that simple, rotating twinkle on its own, a gentle flicker of light, like the flames of the candles that lit the never-shuttered windows in Crozer’s Clayton Street chemists.