“Close your eyes, my love”
Born in 1946, Bridget St John is best known for three studio albums released between 1969 and 1972. Of the three, Ask Me No Questions is most renowned, and most instrumentally restrained. Its songs mostly feature St John’s low and mellow voice accompanied by fingerstyle guitar played by St John herself and occasional guests like John Martyn. Ask Me No Questions is excellent British folk music. A collection of romantic songs which brush past you like a warm day in April – songs of Spring.
The album sounds gentle and full, woody and calm. Throughout her lyrics St John describes her love for another and intersperses this with descriptions of her love for nature. The songs are gentle and poetic. Her lyrics conjure a great and continually growing tapestry of the world that surrounds her. Feelings of love for people and love of landscape balance and flow through the whole album.
The playful opening track, To B Without a Hitch is a swift introduction to St John’s perspective, establishing her as the observer both separate from and at one with the Earth around her. In this way, St John reminds me of a romantic poet. Her lyrics, certainly poetic, reflect British romanticism in their sentimentality and account of nature as a sublime, interconnected force. St John gives us nature on so many levels, from the slow crawling of ivy to the flight of a bee or the sea, its waves and the sun that shines upon it. On the micro scale, St John also reminds me of Thomas Hardy in his 1901 poem An August Midnight. Hardy explores his own insignificance in the context of the natural world with a self-deprecating joy as he watches insects flying around his page. It is this combination of adoration for the natural world, humour, and neat observation that characterises a lot of St John’s writing on Ask Me No Questions. Natural imagery only falls away during the more sombre track Broken Faith where St John discusses the end of a relationship.
“If along the way, I hold your hand
Be not angry
It’s not my place to stay, yet here I stand”
While natural images fade from view here, the soft and profound love St John describes remains, it’s just seen from the other side of the river as she comes to terms with its loss.
The album is one of moments. And it has so many wonderful moments. Perhaps my favourite is found in Like Never Before. The song follows a pair of lovers spending a peaceful, blissful day on the beach together. St John sings
“Race you to the shore I’m sure I’ll get you long before you do”
In this line she marries the melodies of her voice and her guitar in a way that is so satisfying to listen to, bringing together two lines of sound which, while complementary, are never the same apart from in this brief moment.
The description of love on the album is also pure and present. In Hello Again (Of Course) – one of my favourite song titles ever – St John describes the feeling of being apart from a loved one. The familiar feeling is captured in such an attentive way as she sings
“You never really go away
It’s just the space between us growing
A little more than it has before”
St John’s idea that distance expands, rather than challenges, her love is full of kindness and hope. “A breach, but an expansion,/ Like gold to airy thinness beat.” Midway through its four-minute runtime there is a wonderful guitar break full of dancing, living notes, another of my favourite moments on the album on one of its strongest tracks.
The original album was only 12 tracks long, but there are two bonus tracks on Spotify. The first is Suzanne, a version of the Leonard Cohen song which is not as easy to cover as you might expect (see the surprisingly bad cover by Nina Simone). I like St John’s version, particularly how it opens and closes with the addition of an incredibly solemn guitar part that makes you breathe in every time you hear it. There is also the track The Road Was Lonely featuring some of the best harmonies on the album. The atmospheric, dreamy vocal layering here wouldn’t sound out of place on a Phoebe Bridgers record some 50 years later.
Ask Me No Questions is an album of seasons, mainly the Springtime. It is a work full of energy, sunlight and warmth that brings forward in me a feeling of comfort and safety, it is a great wash of yellow light from a broad sky. It is a green album, it hasn’t turned auburn or withered away, it remains a living, verdant green from front to back. While a beautiful album throughout, its original closer is its absolute peak for me. At nearly 8 minutes, the eponymous Ask Me No Questions could go on for twice as long and I’d still be happy to listen to it start to finish. It is both the most romantic song on album, and the song most in harmony with nature. This song has something rare that very few songs have. I can’t quite describe it; it is a rich and unique quality. Some of the album’s best writing comes through on this song with such a gentle and pure love
“And in the morning
Don’t tell a soul of what you saw
It’s just for you
Keep this a secret
Make me a promise that you will
I’ll make one too
Close your eyes, my love
Close your eyes, gently, come”
When you listen to this song it feels like you’ve been let in on a secret which you want to tell everyone you know but want to keep to yourself at the same time. When the guitar fades out in exchange for the sound of birdsong, river water and wedding bells we find ourselves the British countryside. We’re finally given the soundscape that St John loves, her imagery emerge in sound as well as her lyrics. For a few minutes we’re left in peace by the river. Then the guitar returns. But the sounds of nature never leave us, we are played out by St John as if we were sitting by the river with a friend. It is a deeply warm and intimate moment.
The album often reminds me of Nick Drake’s first two. Indeed, in a 1999 interview St John recalls her time on same scene Drake, sitting together outside a (now closed) folk club named Les Cousins on Greek Street (today its building is next door to a very good Italian Restaurant called Lina Stores). She recalls these moments with fondness: “I didn’t need to say much with him” [1]. I don’t want to place St John’s work in the shadow Drake’s here, it has not received the same level of attention over the last 50 years and is distinct in many ways. But similarities in both artists’ use of tone, rhythmic guitar playing, observant lyrics and fondness for natural imagery (especially in I Like To Be With You In The Sun) lead me to hold the two in a similar area musically. There is a shared feeling between the music that the two have produced; this is no bad thing. In my eyes St John is able to create moments just as wonderful as Drake so often does.
Ask Me No Questions offers us glimpses into intimate moments on the smallest scale, reminding us to pay attention to what is around us and breathe; it puts us in touch with feelings of love. John Keats asks in his poem To Autumn “where are the songs of spring?” A century and a half later Bridget St John answers this question. Ask Me No Questions is full of songs for Spring. St John’s blue-sky lyricism and wonderful guitar playing provides us with a consistent album of folk songs filled with an admirable pleasure in life which has quickly become one of my folk favourites.
References:
[1] https://www.chickfactor.com/interviews/bridget-st-john/
maxim knowles 
Leave a comment