The Coldharbour RoadStornoway, Beachcomber's Windowsill

Named after a real road, which is the whole method of this band in four words.

A real place

There are Coldharbour Roads and Coldharbour Lanes across England — the name is old and common, and it attaches to unremarkable stretches of road in unremarkable places. Naming a song after one is a deliberate refusal of the grand gesture.

This is Briggs’ writing at its most typical. The song does not tell you what to feel about the road. It tells you about the road, precisely, and lets the feeling arrive on its own.

How it is built

It runs to four and a half minutes and takes most of them getting somewhere. The opening is sparse — voice, guitar, space — and the arrangement thickens by increments until the last third is carrying strings and brass and the full three-voice harmony.

That patience is what separates the album tracks on this record from the singles. Zorbing has to land in thirty seconds. This does not, and uses the freedom.

Why it matters on the record

Fourth of eleven, it sits at the point where an album either establishes that it has range or admits that it does not. Beachcomber’s Windowsill establishes it here.

It is also one of the clearest examples of the geography that runs through the whole catalogue: roads, coastlines, weather, tide and the specific texture of small English places, written by someone who spends his working life outdoors in them.

English place names as a subject

There is a long tradition of English songwriting that takes its authority from naming real, unglamorous places: a road, a junction, a town nobody has heard of. It works because a named place cannot be argued with. The listener either knows it or trusts that the writer does.

Stornoway belong to that tradition and extend it outwards into landscape and weather. Across the catalogue you get saltmarsh, tide, coastline, migration routes and specific roads, and the effect is cumulative: by the third album the band have built a geography rather than a set of settings.

The name Coldharbour is itself old, probably medieval, and attaches to hundreds of sites across the country. A song named after one of them is a song about all of them.

What the reviews said at the time

Alexis Petridis, reviewing Beachcomber’s Windowsill for the Guardian on 20 May 2010, opened on this song’s extended seabird metaphor and was not kind about it, invoking Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull as a cautionary tale.

He then described what happens next as the song recovering itself: a surge out of mournful, reverb-heavy violin and banjo into a headlong rush of sound, which he offered as evidence that anyone put off by the band would be missing out.

The criticism and the defence are about the same forty seconds of music, which is a fair description of how this song works.

In the sequence

On the record it follows Fuel Up and leads into Boats and Trains. That puts it fourth of eleven, at 4:28.

It stayed an album track. The sleeve, the sessions and the chart run belong to Beachcomber's Windowsill.