ABOUT THIS ITEM

For this double A-sided gem of a 7" single, Lancaster’s resident wayfarer of characterful psych-roots music, Dan Haywood congregated his 9 piece New Hawks country band in a local church: what followed was a righteous revisiting of two of the perkiest cuts from their much-lauded eponymous triple debut album (a record that’s "positively livid with ideas" according to The Wire). As ever with Haywood, there's a whole bibliography of references lurking on the lyric sheet. The man himself pegs 'John’s Shoes' as a slab of "goose-shooting Outer-Hebridean OCD funk", its title bizarrely cribbing a phrase from a set of printed napkins depicting "'Sayings of the Pennsylvanian Dutch". 'Superquarry', meanwhile, does what somebody just had to do; marrying a slinky latin-tinged acoustic shuffle to the tale of a proposed quarry development on the Scottish island of Harris, finally abandoned on environmental grounds in 2004. More broadly for Haywood it evokes "a beautiful nation sullied by fear and greed", as well as nailing some closely held home truths.The single finds both of these songs reborn in a celestial reverb chamber populated by bongos, fiddles, guitars, pedal steel, organs and who knows what else: a gorgeous primer for those yet to explore the fertile wilds of Dan Haywood's New Hawks.