The Ambiguity of David Thomas Broughton

by THOMAS BLAKE on 8 JANUARY, 2016 in FILM, FOLK MUSIC REVIEWS

Viv Stanshall, Syd Barrett, Kevin Ayers, Robyn Hitchcock, Frank Sidebottom, Richard Dawson – England has always done a good line in wilfully obscure or idiosyncratic songwriters, so much so that the term ‘English eccentric’ has become something of an unutterable music critic cliché. When everyone from Ray Davies to PJ Harvey to Screaming Lord Sutch gets lumped under the same banner it might just indicate lazy music writers, or it might mean that there really is something in the ale that nurtures these outsider talents and endears them to the listener.

One such talent is David Thomas Broughton. Broughton hails from Otley in Yorkshire, an eccentric place in it own right (it is home to five active Morris dancing sides, which is impressive for a town of fewer than 14,000 inhabitants). He has lived in both North and South Korea, where he somehow managed to indulge his passion for ornithology. He plays loop pedal and a guitar, and sings. In the last ten years he has released upwards of half a dozen albums, as well as a couple of EPs, despite having little or no interest in the music business.

Just your average reclusive folky type, you might think. But you’d be wrong. For one thing, he is far from reclusive. A frequent live performer, his shows can be confrontational, intimate or bizarre. And, as a new film sets out to prove, there is nothing average about Broughton’s approach to composition or performance.

There is a clip less than three minutes into Greg Butler’s documentary, The Ambiguity of David Thomas Broughton, in which we are shown a heavily industrialised landscape, presumably Korean, hazed by pollutants, grim and unlovely. The scene cuts to footage of a pageant of unicyclists and people dressed as eggs. Over it all swoons music of beautiful, looped ambience, sounding almost like the cry of a gull, but coaxed into soft lapidary forms. These few seconds are Broughton in microcosm: deliriou...