The Velvet Voices – No Straight Lines After Midnight Album

From a spider with absolutely no respect for personal space to a mysterious encounter on a Kent road, a chance romance in Spain and a burglary that left its mark, The Velvet Voices return with a new album recorded in Le Touquet, France. Twenty-two musicians, plenty of stories and proof that life’s rarely as straightforward as we’d like.

Following our musical love letter to Romney Marsh, The Velvet Voices have been at it again. This time we’ve crossed the Channel, settled into a private recording studio in Le Touquet and emerged with an album called No Straight Lines After Midnight.

The album brings together 22 musicians, most professionally trained, the rest seasoned amateurs. It was recorded, engineered and mastered in France, although the stories behind the songs have travelled rather further.

And what stories they are.

There’s a spider called Steve, an encounter with biometric border controls, an unexpected romance in a Spanish bar, a watch that stopped at precisely the wrong moment and a house that no longer feels like home.

In other words, something for everyone. Unless you’re frightened of spiders. In which case, we apologise in advance.

Let’s begin with Steve.

Steve has eight legs, no manners and absolutely no understanding of personal boundaries.

The inspiration for Steve Is On The Ceiling came from a dear friend whose fear of spiders is matched only by her ability to produce a scream capable of waking the dead.

Steve, for his part, was simply going about his business.

Unfortunately, his business involved somebody else’s ceiling.

What follows is five minutes of escalating panic, attempted diplomacy and the sort of negotiations normally reserved for international hostage situations.

The spider eventually leaves. Our friend’s dignity takes rather longer to recover.

And just when peace appears to have returned, Steve’s mate turns up.

We suspect the sequel may require professional counselling. Possibly for the spider.

From eight-legged intruders, we move to an altogether more familiar menace: technology.

Accept All began while one of us was queuing to leave Britain, surrounded by biometric machines issuing instructions about where to stand, what to look at and which information to surrender.

Apparently, getting out of the country now involves convincing a machine you’re actually you.

The song takes that experience and asks a wider question about the modern world.

We accept cookies, accept terms, accept surveillance, accept that another machine knows what’s best for us. We click boxes we haven’t read and agree to things we don’t understand.

And somewhere along the way, we’ve started accepting the unacceptable.

It’s a song about technology, certainly. But more importantly, it’s about the people trying to live ordinary lives in a world increasingly run by screens.

The album’s title takes its inspiration from a rather wonderful story told by one of our bass players.

They walked into an LGBTQI bar in Spain alone.

They walked out holding somebody’s hand.

No elaborate plan. No expectations. Just an evening that took an unexpected and rather beautiful turn.

That became No Straight Lines, a seven-minute celebration of love, freedom, friendship and the simple pleasure of being yourself.

It’s about people who don’t necessarily follow the paths others have laid out for them.

About finding a connection when you’re least expecting one.

And about understanding that life doesn’t come with a compulsory route map.

Sometimes the best things happen when you stop worrying about where you’re supposed to be going.

Then things get decidedly stranger.

The inspiration for 3:17 came during a journey along the A258 between Dover and Deal.

Near a place associated with the local legend of the Grey Lady, a watch inexplicably stopped.

The time was 3:17.

Now, there are perfectly sensible explanations for watches stopping. Batteries fail. Mechanisms break. Sometimes things simply stop working.

But when it happens at that particular spot, surrounded by stories of ghostly encounters, the imagination gets going.

The result is a dark, unsettling tale of a mysterious passenger, an old secret and a clock that refuses to move forward.

Is it a ghost story? A guilty conscience? Or simply what happens when a strange coincidence meets a songwriter with an overactive imagination?

We’ll leave that to you, the listener.

Although we might suggest checking your watch before travelling that road after dark.

Not every song on the album comes from something funny or mysterious.

Some come from things that hurt.

While we were in Le Touquet recording, one of our musicians received the dreadful news that their home had been burgled.

The anger was immediate. So was the disbelief.

But beneath both lay something much harder to shake: the knowledge that a stranger had entered the one place where they should have felt completely safe.

Their words, their emotions and their struggle to make sense of what had happened inspired The House Won’t Sleep.

It’s about the damage that remains long after the police have gone and the locks have been changed.

Because a burglary isn’t just about what somebody takes.

It’s about what they leave behind.

The song is dedicated to our fellow musician.

And sometimes music says things that ordinary conversation simply can’t.

Twenty-two musicians, one album

Like our earlier Romney Marsh album, No Straight Lines After Midnight brings together people from different backgrounds, with different musical experiences, united by the pleasure of making something together.

The songs don’t all sound alike, and nor should they. They’re born of different experiences, places, moods and people.

There’s humour, affection, frustration, mystery and a fair amount of human vulnerability.

What connects them isn’t a particular place, as with Romney Marsh, but the wonderfully unpredictable business of being alive.

Because life’s rarely tidy. It doesn’t always follow the plan. Sometimes it takes you somewhere unexpected, sometimes it frightens you, and sometimes it introduces you to someone who changes everything.

And occasionally, just occasionally, there’s a spider on the ceiling called Steve.

We hope you enjoy the album as much as we’ve enjoyed making it.

You can listen to the full album here:

No Straight Lines After Midnight – The Velvet Voices on YouTube

The Shepway Vox Team

The Velvet Voices of Voxatiousness