Domestic liner notes by Jon Woolcott

Over the last fifty years Britons have become more private: we are less for the pub, the club, the Methodist Hall or the church, and we are more for home. When we’re not at work we’re more likely to be gathered around the kitchen, hearth and bedroom with our families – complex, occasionally difficult and fractious units in small spaces. But where in popular music is this reflected? You could look a long time and find little that describes your life as it’s really lived. Pop music seems to prefer a more public space to act out its usual concerns.

But we have Paul Armfield. One of our most thoughtful and sensitive songwriters, this tender man with a tender voice has, over a run of albums, carefully picked over obsessions which have made him a unique talent, whether investigating Tennyson’s poetry, or recording an album based on finding a cache of old photographs in a Berlin street market, releasing the music and the photographs together.

In “Domestic”, Armfield turns his gaze on our home lives, and more than ever before on himself. This is an unflinching stare but, as ever, his words and music are surprising, elliptical, precise. His voice soars, the delicate musicianship of his pan-European band takes unexpected, and all the more rewarding turns, just as his lyrics do. It’s never been easy to pin down his music or to slot him neatly into a genre;  but here he is anyway,  most definitely and defiantly himself, a smoky voice, at once deep and profound, tentative and emotional, leading a band finding their way through the accidentals of life with slow jazzy chords. This is an artist at home, in every sense.

When Armfield writes, sings and plays about home, he means bricks and mortar, but he also means its associations: family, love and sometimes even emptiness – like the feeling of a house without its children described so beautifully in “Fledgling”. He also uses the domestic setting to examine the wider world, and to wonder about what belonging might mean. The shadow of Brexit looms, as it does over so much, but Armfield brings nuance and a lightness of touch to this thorny problem: we’re all “washed up on the shore … just a mongrel like yourself” he sings on “Flagbearers”. Armfield is proudly from the Isle of Wight, but proves himself again to be essentially a European artist, loved and fêted across the continent.

A deliberate withdrawal has gifted this gentle man even more humanity. He’s spoken about wanting to hibernate, retreating from the world after he left a highly visible job, and of his long solitary walks around the streets at night, repeated beatings of the bounds. Once I was lucky enough to join him. He’d invited me to the island for an event and afterwards we walked through a springtime midnight to an Arboretum, and then to the harbour where Paul pointed out a large boat lit up brightly: the visiting sister ship of a warship from Poland, which one night in the Second World War had defended the island from aerial attack, its guns becoming dangerously hot from their continual firing. His home may be the inspiration for “Domestic”, but in this close sifting of its particularity, he’s also thought and written deeply about our connections to elsewhere, and the debts we owe.

In many ways Armfield is the perfect artist for our times: an English European who has composed a whole album about home and released its beauty into the world just as many of us are emerging from months of house-bound anxiety. And in turning inwards, he cannot help but look outwards too.  “Domestic” reveals a musician whose sometimes heart-breaking love songs to home tell us much about our relationship to the world beyond familiar shores.

Jon Woolcott, Dorset, April 2020