ALBUM REVIEW

Emerge, Return

The Bookshop Band

ALBUM OF THE MONTH

9

By David Rea

4 October 2025

Release date: 28 June 2024

Label: Letterpress Records

IT BEGAN WITH a small parting gift. To say thank you for the use of Pete Townshend’s studio and lodge, The Bookshop Band’s Ben Please and Beth Porter gave him a box of their CDs. A few months later, they got an email from him.

’I am enchanted, such variation and delicacy,’ Townshend said of their music, ‘such latent power, really great work. It reminded me of my days listening to Sandy Denny and Fairport [Convention] and The Incredible String Band… a great discovery and inspiration.’ He was so enamoured he offered to produce their next album. ‘It is not something we could have predicted happening,’ Ben Please said on The Bookshop Band’s podcast.

It is not something anyone could have predicted happening. With his iconic wheeling guitar arm, stadium rock god Townshend hardly seems a likely fit with a quiet acoustic duo who usually gig in bookshops. Townshend was the principal architect behind classic rock trailblazers the Who, and more recently has worked with Green Day, Paul Weller and Pearl Jam. But then, as one of the most celebrated alumni of the postwar British art school, he was also instrumental in widening pop music’s creative borders in the 1960s and 1970s. And given he was a one-time bookshop owner and associate editor at Faber & Faber, working with a band who have written 13 albums inspired by books begins to make some sort of sense.

It still feels like two worlds colliding though. Ben Please described working with Townshend as a ‘rollercoaster’, conjuring studio scenes of creative chaos, but given the distinctive and bewitching music the three of them made together, they clearly found considerable synergy. The first thing that strikes you on hearing the album’s unique take on baroque folk is the almost complete absence of reverb. Aptly enough, this sounds like music played in a bookshop, where walls of old tomes absorb any ring or echo. It recalls the smoke-filled British folk clubs of the 1960s and 1970s, where Ewan MacColl, Shirley Collins, Anne Briggs et al sang traditional folk songs with only their lungs to control the volume. Recording this way could easily have led to an overly austere sound and earnest tone were it not for the imaginatively ornate production.

Listen to ‘Faith in the Weather’ from Emerge Return here:

Left to right: Beth Porter, Pete Townshend and Ben Please. Photo: Martin Tompkins

There are acoustic guitars and cello strings (played with a bow or plucked), ukuleles and hand claps, Nexus Arps, Mellotrons and glockenspiels. ‘[Pete Townshend] brought his great musicality and experience to the recording process,’ Ben Please told BBC News in 2024, ‘doing things we’d never have thought of ourselves, offering a different perspective on the songs. That's the value of working with a great producer. And the fact that he ended up playing on every track added an extra dimension.’ The trio have filled the corners and margins of these songs with curiosities, sketching a little Alice in Wonderland delight into ‘Doll’ (at 1.03 and 1.58), and a Pete Townshend vocal part in ‘Why I Travel This Way’ which is so oddly perfect it brings a smile. It all makes for a luxurious listening experience, appealing to the head as much as the heart, and will have you reaching for a good pair of headphones.

Inspired by books which include the prescient Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) and The Testaments (Margaret Atwood), the lyrics construct a dark and perilous world, a response The Bookshop Band have said to ‘themes surrounding the oppression of bodies, free will and free speech’. (You don’t, however, need to have read these books to be drawn into the songs conjured from them.) Emerge, Return’s world is populated by the displaced, travelling down rivers and roads, searching for sanctuary — ‘the smuggled out, the smuggled in’, ‘[people] taken by the wind and swept away’. Ravens silhouetted against winter skies are blown about by unpredictable fate; there is a little owl ‘hiding from the world around’ who ‘sees underground’.

The 10-song vinyl release (the digital version features 12 songs) finishes with a glimpse of better times. In the coda to the penultimate song ‘Why I Travel This Way’, the bittersweet mood shifts towards hope. A new melody sweeps away the shadows with brilliant sunshine, as a traveller, holding a picture of an absent loved one and calling out their name, proclaims they are happy again. It is heartbreaking and uplifting all at once, opening the way for the closing track ‘The Night We Came to Wigtown’, a wonderfully riotous celebration of friendship, books, wine, music and home.

With its granular exploration of subjective experience, literature during the Cold War celebrated the intellectual freedom of the democratic West, in a time when authoritarian regimes were strong-arming art into propaganda. As quasi-despotic regimes now take hold in Europe, North America and elsewhere, these songs from a small room, exploring boundless worlds, feel timely. Emerge, Return’s celebration of literature and the imagination, alongside its empathy for the disenfranchised might soon sound like an act of defiance in our progressively authoritarian world. But for today at least, it is simply a unique achievement to be treasured.