When The Sun Has Legs By Chrissie and Steve Sheppard

 

When The Sun Has Legs

By

Chrissie and Steve Sheppard

Written by

Andy Rogers

 

Chrissie and Steve Sheppard are of course well known as the owners of One World Music Radio and as show presenters. Steve is also famous for his expertly crafted music reviews, while Chrissie is an expert in holistic therapies. For the last few years they have also been recording and releasing their own brand of music. Steve has long been a fan of “New Age” music and Chrissie loves flute based music, so it was inevitable that their music follows that course, albeit with their own unique stylings.

The new album from Steve and Chrissie is called When The Sun Has Legs, a phrase popular on Cyprus (where they live), that refers to when the sun shines from behind clouds and causes shafts of sunlight to fall from sky to ground in an almost biblical way. Apparently Steve and Chrissie had been out for the day, making their way home during a storm that suddenly cleared with the appearance of sunshine behind the clouds. Suitably inspired, once home they went immediately into the studio and this entire album was completed in one day.

The six tracks on the album take us through a day which starts out sunny and calm, descends into a fierce and wild storm then clears to leave us once again in sunshine by a calm sea. The first track Peaceful Harbour is a quiet morning as we hear the sounds of harbour life around us, gentle sea and seagulls with distant church bells. The music reflects this with an almost ambient feel: held notes with a lead instrument that sounds almost like a harp – very evocative and calming.

We find the title track up now, When The Sun Has Legs, here you can feel the day changing. The sun has gone behind the clouds. Rain is starting to fall as the music becomes darker and more intense. The volume of the music increases as the track ends with rippling piano leading us into track 3 Before the storm here Chrissie’s flute is very much to the fore, hovering over Steve’s ambient keyboards and increasingly menacing rain and thunder.

By track 4 Storm Front we are well and truly in the throes of a violent storm, the music has a darker texture now, ambient chords with recurring musical motifs all battle with the sounds of crashing waves, wind, rain and loud thunder-claps. Eventually the music fades into the distance leaving just the sounds of the storm taking us into track 5 Aftermath. The storm slowly recedes leaving a ghostly-sounding choir that is slowly joined by keyboards and flute before suddenly a voice appears with an almost operatic feel… there is a sense of the worst being over as we are once again down by the sea with gentle waves and seagulls.

Track 6 Clear Skies opens with church bells, the message being all is calm once again; Chrissie’s flute drifts over a backing track that gains an increasingly more positive feel to the mood of the music as it progresses. The flute returns over an accompaniment of gentle strings and bright effects before the church bells increase in intensity and the track fades out leaving the village to return to normal now that the storm has passed.

When the Sun has Legs is an impressive album - it manages to capture the feeling of a stormy day really well in just sound and music – if you like your New Age music to be evocative of nature and have a slightly ambient feel then you could do a lot worse than give this album a listen.