After what has felt like a long, wet and cold winter down here on the coast, Spring has finally begun fighting it’s way in, and as I write this, it’s a sunny and mild morning, and another sure sign Spring is here is that my hayfever has returned with a vengeance.

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It also felt like an appropriate /Tuesday Ten was needed, too, and this one comes from a suggestion thread in summer 2020 that has now spawned three separate posts: Roses, Flowers and now Trees.

The humble tree plays an enormously important role in the environment. They reduce erosion, they provide habitat for countless other flora and fauna, and they absorb Carbon Dioxide. They have provided fuel, fruit for food (in some cases!) and building material. They are, in some cases, sacred and/or important to local communities as symbols. But as forests are cut down, they accelerate climate change too.

So this is a /Tuesday Ten about the tree, in various ways. Put down some temporary roots and read/listen along with me – and if you suggested songs, thanks for your input.

A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Belly
/Feed The Tree
/Star

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Probably Belly’s best-known and (maybe!) greatest song is a surging power-pop marvel, the way that Tanya Donnelly’s vocals get more and more frenzied and forceful on each chorus (and what a chorus!). The tree is both a presence in the song (“Big red tree grew up and out, Throws up its leaves, Spins round and round“) and a metaphor for the ending of one life and the growth of another. A grandparent educates a grandchild about death and urges them to show respect and grow to an adult themselves, as they scatter the ashes of their lifelong partner at the root of the tree.

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/John Grant
/Pale Green Ghosts
/Pale Green Ghosts

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The shadowy electronic pulses – courtesy of collaborator Birgir Thórarinsson (Gus Gus) – of the title track of John Grant’s meisterwerk feel like they are replicating the road noise along the Interstate near his Colorado hometown, rattling over the concrete. But the song isn’t about the journey, it’s about what he’s been through as a gay man in a family and word that didn’t want to accept him. But it is also about the dread of going home, as the invasive Russian Olive Trees – the Pale Green Ghosts of the title – that line local highways and remind him how close he is to home, whether he wants to be or not.

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/Marika Hackman
/Apple Tree
/I’m Not Your Man

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I’m Not Your Man felt like the point where Hackman found her voice, in an album of snappy put-downs, great songs and huge hooks. But there were a number of darker moments where the hedonism and the sexual edge were discarded for deep introspection, and they were something of a harbinger for future albums. Apple Tree is very much the latter, a song masquerading somewhat as a folky lament while she imagines being a corpse hanging on an apple tree that is at the same time providing food in the form of apples – and thus a metaphor for being an artist that has to wring themselves dry to provide entertainment for others.

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/Lycia
/Spring Trees
/Quiet Moments

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The Arizona goths Lycia featured in the /Tuesday Ten about winter recently, and now, they turn with me to Spring. This gentle, acoustic-ambient lament – full of reverb as is their style – floats along with a song that appears to suggest the end of a polyamorous arrangement with no hard feelings, as they realise it is time to move on. But like the trees in Spring, which are preparing to grow anew, there is the chance to start again and hope for something new.

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/Frank Turner
/English Curse
/England Keep My Bones

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The New Forest was not a good place to be a son of William the Conqueror – Richard of Normandy died in a hunting accident in the decade after 1066, and then William II (also known as William Rufus) more infamously was killed by an arrow in the forest, and this a capella track from my favourite Frank Turner album tells a version of the story.

The oak has something of a special place in English history – they can grow to substantial sizes, the oldest with massive trunks, such as the Knightswood Oak in the New Forest, which has a girth of over 7 metres. Bearing in mind that it is reckoned to be over 500 years old, it likely first germinated around the time of Henry VIII…

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/Brian McNeill
/The Yew Tree
/No Silence

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The longevity of English Oaks, though, are nothing compared to Yew Trees. The European Yew has examples in the UK reckoned to be thousands of years old (although there appears to be some debate about exactly how old they are), and perhaps unsurprisingly is a symbol of immortality thanks to it. But also one of death and doom, thanks to pretty much every part of the tree being poisonous in some way or another.

The small village of Ormiston in East Lothian, Scotland, is home to the Great Yew of Ormiston, a giant tree that is understood to be at least a thousand years old. As the Battlefield Band‘s striking folk song details (I’m featuring ex-member Brian McNeill’s solo version as I like the stark sound better), it has seen much of Scotland’s history happen around it, from multiple battles for independence, John Knox‘s involvement in the Reformation (it is said sermons were said literally under the tree), and to this day it still stands tall.

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/Rush
/The Trees
/Hemispheres

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A band that, despite being suggested relatively frequently, I’ve only ever included in the series once before, so here’s a second, from an album that is just a couple of months younger than me. And like everything by Rush, it’s not exactly like everyone else. Here, a proggy rock song (that begins with an acoustic-folk motif that doesn’t sound a million miles from the classic Spın̈al Tap spoof Stonehenge…) explodes into life to describe the fight for prominence in a Canadian woodland between Maple and Oak trees, the Oaks growing taller and hogging the sunlight. They are both, mind, eventually kept in check by the loggers…

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/Marlene Dietrich
/Untern Linden – Untern Linden
/Marlene singt Berlin, Berlin

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Historically one of the grandest streets in Berlin, Unter den Linden is the core of the main east-west axis in the centre of the Mitte district, continuing west beyond Brandenburger Tor into the Tiergarten, and continuing north-east over the River Spree. The street itself is named – and famous for – the Linden Trees that have lined it since the late 1600s (even if the current trees were replanted in the 1950s in the post-war era), and it has been the subject of a Johann Strauss III waltz (one that will be familiar to the listeners of the Vienna New Year’s Day concert, as it has certainly been played more than once in recent years.

Dietrich’s take on a marvellously upbeat song about her home city was originally written by Walter Kollo, Rudolf Bernauer and Rudolf Schanzer, all notable composers and playwrights in the Weimar era, and is an entertaining jaunt down the street as they watch the great and good going about their business…

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/Shirley Collins
/The Banks of Green Willow
/Lodestar

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Another folk song for this week – perhaps unsurprisingly there are a lot of folk songs that feature trees, and I could have done another /Tuesday Ten just on those – sees Shirley Collins feature for the first time in this series. Collins broadly retired from singing in the late 70s, fading into obscurity before being coaxed back into signing by David Tibet of Current 93 (!) among others, and Lodestar in 2016 – her first album in 38 years, at the age of 80 – was rapturously received. Her take on the traditional song The Banks of Green Willow is austere and in many ways horrifying. A young man goes to sea, his young sweetheart disguised as a man to join him, but the gig is up when she gives birth to a child during a violent storm. They are seen as a curse on the ship, and she volunteers to be thrown overboard, to die and be buried under the banks of green willow trees.

The imagery is pretty striking – and willow trees are a common sight on British riverbanks – but this was at sea, so how did she end up on a river under the trees? Maybe I shouldn’t think too much about this.

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/XTC
/Grass
/Skylarking

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XTC were a very English band, one preoccupied with being English, and very much from the provinces rather than London – the band remain probably the best-known band from the Wiltshire railway town of Swindon. Skylarking is a gorgeous album, full of nods to the psychedelic rock of their youth (and, frankly, would never have happened for the unexpected success of the side-project The Dukes of Stratosphear the year before), and Grass in particular is so evocative of an English summer in a park. In this case it was inspired by Coate Water on the fringes of Swindon, but the listener will doubtless be transported by the gentle acoustic guitars and violins and Colin Moulding’s soothing voice to their own favourite park.

Mine will always be Finsbury Park, the tree-lined park that we lived just a couple of streets from for well over a decade, and during lockdowns was a place to escape and get a tiny bit of normal life back. Weirdly, for a Londoner anyway, down here in Hythe few people use the parks in the same way, but then, most people have gardens here – something of a luxury for many in London.