Oliver: Butterfly Child - Violin [Peel Session] (1 March 1992)

"A butterfly child/So free and and so wild/And so full of living"  - copyright to Marty Wilde and Ronnie Scott (not that one).

I was still a few months away from buying the 1968 compilation cassette which included Jesamine by The Casuals and included the line that started us off here, when the Belfast trio, Butterfly Child had their first Peel Session broadcast on 1/3/92.  I was even further away from getting into The House of Love, whose arpeggios are effortlessly evoked throughout Violin.  But instead of Guy Chadwick's hot mess of tangled emotions and passions, Joe Cassidy instead weaves Donovan-like poetry.  Certainly, the bard of Maryhill would have been delighted with a line like "Underwater ripples offer bluer colour".
This track and Led Through the Mardi Gras were the only two tracks from Butterfly Child's session that I would have kept.  Led Through the Mardi Gras was even better than Violin, starting like a back-street samba before transforming into a thunderous rocker out of which Cassidy's voice peeks through like someone singing out of a standing wall of fire. Unfortunately, I couldn't track it down.  I wasn't persuaded by the other two tracks: Shipwreck Song and Neptune's Fork which both tried to combine the intricacy and the power of Violin and Led Through the Mardi Gras to diminishing returns.  In their letter to him, which contained two different line-ups for the band, they invited Peel to drop in for a cup of tea next time he was in Belfast.

Video courtesy of smithdream.