I do get frustrated when music like Pete’s seems to attract overtly American points of reference. Tags such as British-Americana, country and even the wry “Paisley Overground” seem to suggest a pastiche or second fiddle status to our colonial cousins being played here but they are all missing the point. Reed in The River just oozes with folky English charm. Even when waxing lyrical about Canada, Georgia or even Turkmenistan, the music still has one foot planted in the rolling hills and the cold West Country clay of his homeland.
Travel broadens the mind for sure but Reed in The River shows that for all the continental drifting our hero undertakes, his musical language is still one that rings with familiarity, one that talks to us through the music of Nick Drake, The Watersons and Vashti Bunyan as much as it can converse with the more superficial and distant references of Simon and Garfunkel and James Taylor.
The world is a smaller place these days for sure, shrinking by the minute and cross cultivation of ideas, creativity and culture is always to be applauded but that isn’t the same as homogenisation and Pete Falloon is the perfect example of someone who can travel the world, either physically or metaphorically, explore everything it has to offer yet never feel the need to compromise his own unique identity.
