At last! An album full of original songs from the multi award winning duo of Deb and Stu Hannah, something that has been hinted at with great songs here and there on albums for years, and is well overdue. Anyone who has followed their career will feel at home with this new material, all of the touchstones that made their interpretation of traditional material so heartfelt and unique are present.
The core of Megson’s choice of material and songwriting has always been a deep understanding of the human condition, so often of the ordinary working class man or woman and how they are shaped by events and conditions out of their control. Traditional material has provided this duo with a rich seam to mine in social injustice, inequality and the often cruel twists of fate surrounding lovers. You can imagine the day when they sat down to collect material for their next album and realised that they didn’t have to look to the past anymore, social inequality, the have and have not’s, a lack of housing and poor working conditions are all a part of modern life.
So everything from zero-hours contracts to the way we can so easily dehumanise those ‘migrants’ is grist for the Megson mill. Being all original this is surely the most ‘Megson’ album yet. They really let rip with the arrangements, yet still keep that signature tension between the plaintive and percussively upbeat that typifies their sound.
Another triumph then from the talented duo, I can’t wait for them to get their teeth into some songs about Brexit, although maybe we’ll have to wait a while for that one…
Iain Hazlewood
