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Britain has a long history of producing bards and troubadours. From Shakespeare to Strummer, the nation has spawned countless tale-spinners whose words resonate with drama and humor, knife-twisting wit and unabashed romanticism -- a lineage that's been transported into the new millennium by Johnny Flynn, a South African émigré whose flair for blending folk tradition and decidedly of-the-moment perspective marks him as an artist capable of captivating at first listen and for the long haul.
"I've always been interested in storytelling as an art form," says the 25-year-old singer-songwriter. "Real epic storytelling. You hear that in Chaucer, and it's mirrored in traditional folk and in the blues. It comes from the same desire to set down patterns of human behavior and try to make sense of the whole human experience."
Flynn wades into that vast expanse with an explorer's panache on his Lost Highway debut, A Larum, taking on topics as varied as coming to terms with the death of a parent (as on the woozy, accordion-leavened "Hong Kong Cemetery") and the importance of life's most basic pleasures (the root of "The Box," a lilting tune Flynn says was inspired by the writings -- and life -- of Henry David Thoreau). A Larum is about more than just Flynn's rapier-sharp lyrics, however: The singer and his bandmates -- collectively known as The Sussex Wit -- mosey affably through 13 tracks that evoke images of Appalachia as often as they do the murkier corners of London, using guitar, banjo, violin and a slew of other acoustic instruments to transport listeners from station to station along the line.
"I like the simplicity and potential honesty of a song that sounds like it's been sandblasted by generations of use," he says of his fondness for folk forms. "Each generation discovers the form and adds to it, or takes away from it, what it sees fit, so it's constantly evolving. With that in mind, it can remain very much of the present and not a fixed, textbook sort of thing."
There's nothing remotely by-the-book about A Larum, which is lovingly imbued by Flynn's casual command of a wide variety of instruments, from the soaring trumpet lines he launches over the bow of "The Box" to the keening violin strains he weaves through the gently pulsing "Tickle Me Pink," which chugs along like an old-fashioned locomotive cutting its way through a foggy Midlands landscape. The dappled soundscapes align beautifully with Flynn's alternately wry and poignant tales, resounding with a crystalline clarity that lives up to the disc's title.
"A Larum is, well, it's middle English for ‘alarm,'" explains Flynn. "I chose the title for a couple of reasons. In Shakespeare, you often see ‘a larum' to indicate some sort of ruckus going on offstage -- and offstage was where real life was taking place. Also, the larum would be the warning bell in every town, and they'd ring it in times of siege and disease, which I think is appropriate for what's going on in the world right now."
Johnny Flynn was born in South Africa in 1983, and picked up his love of the performing arts early on, thanks to a character actor father best known for regular appearances on such classic TV shows as Doctor Who and The Avengers. That affinity for acting proved to be hereditary, as Johnny has also spent much of his teen and adult life in Shakespearian ensembles -- like Propeller, which brought him to New York City last year for an acclaimed run in Twelfth Night and Taming of the Shrew at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Music, however, bulled to the fore of Flynn's consciousness at the dawn of his adolescence, when he happened upon a copy of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan -- introducing him to the man he still credits as one of his biggest influences. Some years later, he'd wander the same downtown streets as a young Robert Zimmerman, falling in with the so-called "anti-folk" movement that had taken root on the Lower East Side.
"I still listen to a lot of the people I was playing with around that time, which was about six years ago now," he says. "I don't know that my songs naturally follow in the same direction as, say Adam Green or Jeffrey Lewis, but we do share something of an aesthetic, an organic way of doing things."
A Larum is as organic a collection of music as one is likely to come across outside a bin of vintage vinyl. But thanks to Flynn's sardonic wordplay -- evident in songs like the hardscrabble "Leftovers" (a dumpster-diver's dinnertime lament that gains a rueful humor from Flynn's wisecracking delivery) and "Wayne Rooney" (named in honor of, but decidedly not a biography of, the Brit soccer star) -- it never seems like he's trying to lead the listener into the backwoods just for the hell of it.
"I'm quite aware of my own sense of music and the mystery in my head that surrounds the music that I love," he says. "Scenes go in and out of fashion and really music doesn't deserve to be on that level, it is what it is and it changes. People should be allowed to do different things, and my goal is to keep doing that as long as I live."
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