Belbury Poly – The Gone Away (Ghost Box)

Belbury Poly’s The Gone Away reopens the town of Belbury with a musical journey through the eeriest Ghost Box hinterlands

After months of news items relating to nothing but death and misery, I felt a renewed sense of hope when rumours surfaced that the bus service between here and there was operating once again. The prospect of a return trip to the town of Belbury was most welcome, particularly after suffering restrictions relating to “the unpleasantness” (as the Belbury Local Office of Information refers to current global events). That left the small matter of locating the co-ordinates of a bus stop in a thin place, but I had my ear to the ground, as it were, and so discovered a stop was due to appear in Avebury village three days hence – from there, unseen roads would lead back to Belbury. It would be, at the very least, good to get out of London. I already had the means to make the journey – the required fare a dull black stone seal I’d had in my possession for many years – so I packed my things and left without further ado. I must admit that I half-expected to find my fellow passengers wearing beak-shaped masks reminiscent of plague doctors, but the reality was actually more disconcerting, as I was in fact the only passenger. The bus driver remained hunched over the steering wheel for the entire journey, grunting and shrugging rather than speaking. Nonetheless, I felt myself drifting off pleasantly, lost in thought. Oh to return to Belbury! But I wondered whether the shops on the high street would be bustling with activity or boarded up? More importantly, would I still be able to get a pint and a ploughman’s from The Bury Bell? I considered these questions as the bus rolled along.

All is not well with the world of course and the terrible unseen also has Belbury in its inexorable grip. But as The Bury Bell jukebox comes to life with the latest album from Ghost Box co-founder Jim Jupp’s Belbury Poly, it soon becomes clear that there is, more than ever, a need for otherworldly music. That it is called The Gone Away might suggest an absence, or at least a removal from the real, but the music rather feels like a journeying in. Jupp actually completed the record prior to lockdown, but like all great Ghost Box works it still manages to straddle the real and the unreal of then and now. The Gone Away marks a turn away from the project’s more jaunty progtronica side, which reached its purest expression in New Ways Out, and finds Belbury Poly lean further into eerie musical hinterlands. Significantly, Jupp plays everything on this record, rather than also utilising session musicians. 2011’s The Belbury Tales was my gateway narcotic into Ghost Box Records and in many ways provided a map that pointed simultaneously to the past and the future. The Gone Away may best be considered an essential part of a future-past trilogy alongside The Willows and The Owl’s Map, the very existence of which can be divined from within The Belbury Tales. Which is to suggest Jim Jupp as someone who exists in different time periods at the same time, rather than view him in the more prosaic role as time traveller.

Opening chapter “Root and Branch” sounds like an afternoon spent in Tolkien’s Old Forest, wandering down towards the Withywindle, its synths and pipes bringing to mind Tom Bombadil as some 1970s dystopian survivor. The sunlight doesn’t linger long though, as Belbury Poly’s fairy folklore intentions are made clear and insidious Machen-ations exposed on “ffarisees”. A woman enunciates words to the night at the track’s beginning (“My eyes are doors / The moon walks through them”) before lopsided electronics contract and expand, suggesting a dive into the infinite through the smallest of doorways. Parts of the title track are then sung from the deepest past, the sampler as photographic device breathing new life into a faded replica. The Gone Away might dial down the progtronica of its immediate predecessors, yet “Fol-de-rol” provides evidence that that avenue hasn’t been erased from the Belbury landscape.

“Sticks and Stones” deploys motorik manoeuvres in the service of Machen, defining a very specific new genre in the process, while “Look Again” feels like a Casio-assisted dance across moonlit lawns. Meanwhile, the bass and stalk of “Copse” presents a cinematic mystery, seen through repeated looking out from around corners. Finally, the gateway back to the place of non-dreams is prised slowly open across “They Left on a Morning Like This”. Delicate magic evoked through vintage electronics, it would intriguingly provide a quietly charged alternate soundtrack to Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy or an imagined finale for the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, albeit one with a murkier than suspected outcome.

Vintage electronics come and go, but Ghost Box has never fallen into the trap of its own influence, remaining as distinct an entity in terms of recorded output and artwork as Mo’ Wax back in the day. A quote from Spike Jonze, writing in the Beastie Boys Book about the band, also applies to why Ghost Box so consistently get it right: “They weren’t just making records, they were making worlds.” Ghost Box and indeed Belbury Poly continue to make records that are worlds and The Gone Away is no exception.