DESCRIPTION:
Original: "Gethsemane", a 1919 poem by Rudyard Kipling

1914-1918
The Garden called Gethsemane
In Picardy it was,
And there the people came to see
The English soldiers pass.
We used to pass—we used to pass
Or halt, as it might be,
And ship our masks in case of gas
Beyond Gethsemane.

The Garden called Gethsemane,
It held a pretty lass,
But all the time she talked to me
I prayed my cup might pass.
The officer sat on the chair,
The men lay on the grass,
And all the time we halted there
I prayed my cup might pass.

It didn't pass—it didn't pass-
It didn't pass from me.
I drank it when we met the gas
Beyond Gethsemane!


Andrew King is an English folk singer, neofolk musician and traditionalist, presenting renditions of traditional songs and ballads, both a capella and with minimalist instrumentation, sometimes with an influence from post-industrial music.

His initial creative work was in the visual arts. After many years of experimentation, he dates his mature work from the first of his Emblematic paintings in 1991. In 1994 he started making documentary recordings of vernacular and traditional songs, music, and customs. He moved to London in 1995 to further this work and the illustrative compositions that he was doing for a number of the post-industrial / neofolk bands of the time (such as L'Orchestre Noir, Current 93, Ernte, Sol Invictus, etc), and to complement this made his first attempts at his own versions of traditional song the following year.

His first album The Bitter Harvest was issued and distributed by World Serpent in 1998 but he now sees it as an apprentice work. He sees his second album The Amfortas Wound (issued by Athanor in 2003) as his first proper album.

He is a resident singer at London's Musical Traditions Club and was employed by the British Library between 2001-2005, for most of that time as an archivist and cataloguer of British traditional culture.

For live performances, when not singing unaccompanied, he works with members of the industrial band Knifeladder. As well as his work with Knifeladder, he has also worked with Les Sentiers Conflictuels, Andrew Liles, Leisur::Hive, Brown Sierra, and Tony Wakeford, and has performed with Changes and Waldteufel.

As well as his solo work, he is also a member of Sol Invictus, Duo Noir and The Triple Tree.

According to his myspace page his influences include such forgotten luminaries as Phil Tanner and Alfred Reed which destroy any conceptions of weird music being anything new.

References

Andrew King MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/AndrewStewartKing
Art Gallery: http://www.fluxeuropa.com/andrewking.htm
Hex Magazine: http://www.hexmagazine.com/hex_hails_news.htm