Michael Chapman
Rainmaker

Call him what you will. Musician, maestro, minstrel.  Narrator of long stories or impressions of a moment, performer of music written in moments of boredom, guitarist for pleasure and not for work. But please: never call him a SINGER.

Michael Chapman never saw himself as a singer; perhaps a man of music, but never a singer. Nor did he ever pretend to be considered one. When he wrote and "sang" a "song" (and the quotation marks are not there by accident), it often happened that he managed to question it from the title: "No Song To Sing". It was as if to the audience, HIS audience (because Michael Chapman never addressed an indistinct audience) he was saying: "Don't expect what you might expect from someone else. I didn't even want to pursue this career, I only pursued it because SOMEONE told me I had talent, and that I could express SOMETHING". But no songs. Michael Chapman's pieces are not songs, and this is not only true for that "No Song To Sing" which could be his manifesto (if such a personality ever needed to hide behind a manifesto); his are simply "things in music", things placed there on any given day, sitting inside a dark room in total solitude, the acoustic guitar the only possible companion. And for him, music is about putting in sensations, acting on impulse, relying on mood. Surrendering to emotional swings, because music itself is pure emotion: and whether the musical background of these life fragments is the homegrown folk heard on the BBC in his youth, or the Blues of the blacks landed across the Channel without becoming "British", or even an evening raga revisited and adapted, well, all that is secondary. At least to him. But not to those who listen again today, after 40 years, and realize that there have been very few underestimated artists like Michael Chapman. Very few indeed.

A musician in his spare time. Photographer and art teacher for work. That was Michael Chapman when he decided he would head south: from Leeds, his city, to the City of a more than ever "Swinging" London, at the end of the '60s, where everyone went and gathered, because IT WAS THERE that the history of new music would be made. The music of "Rainmaker", the first commitment of a contract with Harvest that would last four albums (until the commercial failure of "Wrecked Again" and the termination) is tradition and novelty at the same time. Tradition in the material, novelty in the approach. And a very personal, almost self-referential guitar style, built piece by piece over years of apprenticeship in lesser folk circuits, and prestigious acquaintances acquired here and there; John Peel and Davy Graham, especially, those who convinced him to come out of the shadows. A unique style, almost the missing link between the rigorous technique of Bert Jansch and the folk married with jazz of John Martyn, with unsuspected exotic hints and a depth/personality of interpretation of the Blues that has nothing much to envy neither from Jansch nor Martyn. And that mature, rough voice, of things experienced, at times lazy as if he had no intention of singing and someone had dragged him out of bed. But indeed, Michael Chapman never saw himself as a singer.

...and of the melodramatic-sentimental love singing of other folksingers he simply couldn't care less; he has never been one for these things. When he told you about the end of a story, he simply said "It Didn't Work Out", without philosophizing too much about it. Essential, realistic, even cynical, without getting lost in metaphors or figurative language. He tells you things as they are. And he tells you, as in "No One Left To Care," to the sound of a Blues that is rock even though it's acoustic, because it's from the approach that you feel it's rock, from those sharp strumming like a sharp blade that leaves no room for mannerism and conventions. Or letting his guitar dialogue with the sound of rain as in the title track, or looking at a culturally liberated India, or falling asleep to the sound of a masterful "Goodbye To Monday Night" - the perfect closure, the one after which there's nothing more to add, the one that makes you say this album is a masterpiece from the first to the last note.

People like Dave "Clem" Clempson, Danny Thompson, and Aynsley Dunbar, of course, do the rest...