Playlist: Cove, coal, concrete

Palma Louca – The Cove

Working from home is one of those topics guaranteed to get readers of tabloid newspapers foaming at the mouth. So it might be a bad idea to mention that Palma Louca’s most recent single, The Cove, owes much of its gentle vibe to band members quietly tinkering in their bedrooms. After all, if rock musicians are going to renounce debauchery and excess in favour of WFH, we really might be approaching the end times.

Or we might be conforming to a much older story. For every mega selling monolith of music, there are millions of hopefuls stroking the strings and pushing the buttons quietly in a back room somewhere. Teasing out the winning formulae, finding the confidence to share an idea and watch it take wing. In that context, music from home makes total sense.

And, in the case of The Cove, the results justify it all. This is a delicate, swoony kind of track. The band describes its music as ethereal-Shoegaze / Alternative soundscape, which sounds like more detail than can easily be processed. But here we have a dreamy world of chiming guitars the sweeps the listener off into a reverie. Last year, Palma Louca was one of the stand-out acts at Sunderland’s Waves Festival in November. And they’re back on Saturday, at the scene of that triumph, the Ship Isis pub. Club Paradise and Daniel Maple provide the support. Tickets available here.

Barry Hyde – Come All You Colliers

Mining was never an industry suited to working from home. The back-breaking toil that fuelled the industrial revolution played a huge role in the northeast’s rise to prosperity; its demise played a still greater part in plunge into urban decline.

Four decades later, there are signs of a renaissance. Progress is patchy, but the arrival of Sunderland Music City is one part of a multi-faceted transformation of the region. The creativity that once devised steam locomotives, incandescent light bulbs and safety lamps for coal mines is still out there, but harnessed in new cultural directions.

Which brings us to Barry Hyde’s latest project – a one-man show from the Futureheads frontman devoted to the region’s mining heritage. It resonates on a personal level: like many, Hyde’s ancestors worked underground and two were killed in one of the many mining disasters that beset the region.

Miner’s Ballads, his second solo album, is a collection hewn from that heritage. Slices of pit village life come back to life via a kind of slightly off-kilter folk music. It feels familiar, yet slightly alien – perhaps partly due to the fact that Hyde does everything here, from researching the history to playing all the instruments and stitching the resulting tracks into a song.

Yet there’s also Come All You Colliers, based on a text direct from A.L. Lloyd’s ‘Come All Ye Bold Miners,’ a compendium of industrial folk music. Published in 1952, it drills deep into the tensions between the workforce and the establishment – this at a time poised between the Festival of Britain and Elizabeth II’s coronation. More than 70 years on, Hyde’s take combines a kind of communalism with a pugnacious edge, capturing both the defiance and the bloody-mindedness of generations of miners. Music and social history in one box? That’ll do for me.

Parastatic (Featuring Late Girl) – With Intent

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, they say. But what of music about architecture? Parastatic, a Tyneside trio back after a decade-long hiatus, are about to release an album exploring brutalism’s legacy – and the effect is as powerful (and potentially divisive) as the concrete structures that inspired it.

If you’ve read some of my non-music musings (such as Peterlee’s Apollo pavilion or a unique football stadium in Galashiels you’ll have guessed I’m partial to a bit of geometric concrete. And a track like ‘With Intent’ renders this in musical form. Angular guitars form an other-worldly soundscape, while Laura of Late Girl delivers lyrics delving deep into the hazy borderline between monumental sculpture and social function (that titular ‘intent’).

This single (and Gareth Wood’s wonderful accompanying video, a paean to a lost future) makes a fantastic introduction to the upcoming album (due out Feb. 21 on Workie Ticket records). And the band is heading out on its longest ever UK tour – seven nights, starting in Stockton, venturing as far south as Brighton, then returning for a hometown Newcastle show on March 1 at Star & Shadow. You can order vinyl here and gig tickets here.

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Previous playlists (2025): Singing in the New