John Metcalfe 'TREE' Live
One of the most beautiful concerts we have ever seen was John Metcalfe ‘Tree’ Live, at Skibbereen Arts Festival 2024. It had such a profound effect on us, and indeed on the entire audience, that we immediately invited him to Fiddle Fair.
Coupled with gorgeous visuals from Jony Easterby, the music reflects an imagined 24-hour cycle in the life of a tree experienced by observing the ever-shifting interplay of light, colour and sound whilst exploring the intense and mystifying effect trees have on us all; our relationship with their physicality, their essence, and their importance to the future of our planet.
Joining John on stage are some of the UK’s finest string players who have played on countless Hollywood film scores and with artists such as Stevie Wonder, Beyoncé and Coldplay.
"Bold. Sweeping. Majestic. Wonderous." Higher Plain Music
"staggeringly beautiful" Mary Anne Hobbs - BBC 6 Music.
Producer and arranger to the likes of Peter Gabriel and Blur, John Metcalfe is one of the most diverse and fearless musicians out there. Born in New Zealand but made in Manchester, he was a member of cult post-punk band Durutti Column and alongside Tony Wilson launched the pioneering Factory Classical on Manchester’s legendary Factory label whilst simultaneously cutting his clubbing teeth at the great city’s Hacienda. Alongside his solo output he has collaborated with a huge range of artists from the worlds of music, dance and film name-dropping artists such as U2, George Michael and Coldplay along the way. He has also performed and recorded with the Max Richter Ensemble.
The viola-playing master had been composing music spontaneously, instinctively, when the idea of TREEarrived. An album that immerses the listener in twenty-four hours of the life of nature’s most majestic creations, it came from a desire in John to write at scale – perhaps a natural reaction for a composer writing out of the silences and solitude of our recent pandemic years. “The pieces I was writing were big and trying to be bigger, so I knew they had to be to do with something – and then I thought about one of the most profound experiences of my life.” This was seeing Tāne Mahuta as an adult, the largest known living kauri tree in the world.
Written for live players and recorded in Abbey Road Studios to convey that feeling, and that human connection at scale, TREE imagines what it would be like to be sat completely still under a tree that you love, being alive to the ever-shifting interplay of light, colour, weather and sound.
TREE isn’t just about Tãne Mahuta, John insists. “It could be about any tree – they’re all very magical.” The one that helped him as he wrote is the mature sycamore at the bottom of his garden, which he walks past every day to go to the shed where he works. “I look at it every single day when I walk down the path, as I sweep up the sycamore pods, as I watch the micro changes through the seasons, throughout the course of the year, and I always find it extraordinary.”
He wonders whether his connection with trees might be about getting older, too; he knows for certain that it's about a need for people to connect with things still growing and flowering around them that have been there for tens, hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. This record isn’t a political statement, he says, but it's clear to him that as science progresses, and as climate breakdown progresses, people are trying to find deeper ways to understand and cherish nature. "It’s about the music that people are trying to create to connect with things that are huge and beautiful and inexplicable around them." TREE is John's beautiful, emotional attempt. "My album's about describing our relationship with something as everyday and extraordinary as a tree, and how it can be an incredibly important part of who we are.”