Original compositions by Mike Martin, with Sam Martin (bass, guitar and backing vocals), Pete Wild (piano & backing vocals), Lindsay Martin (fiddle), Ross Smithard (fiddle & banjo),Kate Burke (guitar, concertina & backing vocals), Robyn Martin (backing vocals), Helen Gill (trumpet) and Dave Harris (saxophone). The songs that make up The Strelley Project ramble their way through all stops along the genres of pop, Celtic, jazz, folk, skiffle and a few places in between. They tumble at you from all directions, from anywhere and everywhere. Without dwelling at length on their setting in the rising, majestic weavings of two master fiddlers and artful, sometimes cheeky jazz-laced piano, with sprinklings of classic cornet, driving sax, and vocal harmonies to die for, there are some basic elements that give a stand-alone quality to the songs of the Strelley collaboration. Through them (in echoes of William Blake) run the strands of innocence and experience that have informed and directed a man’s life and art. Innocence is at the forefront in the idealism of the songs, in their willingness to take up causes: the jousting at ‘the tyranny of democracy’ in Bureaucracy (How long will it be / Til it’s a necessity/ For me to fill out the form / To make love to my wife?) or the gentle, lyrical yet relentless indictment of child abuse and exploitation in Silent Tears, where a boy soldier and young girl carry their pain from a time ‘too long ago to be angry, and too close to forget.’ And experience walks just alongside, tempering the vision and keeping it firmly grounded – in the grim traveller’s-eye view of unbending poverty with no escape that is presented in Bogota, or in the road-savvy musings of the old minstrel in Paid My Dues, who knows that, while ‘some get lucky, and some get wise’, in the end the curtain just keeps on rising and falling upon ‘another day, another night, another life, another show’. In the world of The Strelley Project, this kind of dues-paying isn’t such a bad thing. It may be that the earth’s population as a whole will never learn to stop casting off its leavings in just any old place (and the composer of Rubbish takes this observation to the level of heartbreak); yet still, someone is needed to call out to those with ears to hear. A voice to tweak us, to remind us, to move us, yet one that also comes at us on our level, not from any assumed higher ground. A voice that coaxes us into seeing things differently, sometimes with a laugh, sometimes with a tear, sometimes with a touch of showman-like razzamatazz. The street is where it all began for him, and within The Strelley Project, at its very heart, one can hear that he hasn’t forgotten.