The debut release of Alasdair Roberts, Debbie Armour, Frankie Armstrong and Benjamin Webb's vocal project is an intimate collection of traditional and newly composed songs.
Recorded live at Studio 95 in Brighton by engineer Tom Pryor, Green Ribbons sees each artist featured solo, in duet and in full ensemble. Ben "Jinnwoo" Webb brought the project together in July of 2018: "Very broadly speaking, unaccompanied singing seems to have gone out of fashion in more recent years – but it's always something I have enjoyed performing and listening to when I've had the chance. I wanted to get a group together whose voices I feel really lend themselves to storytelling, and focus purely on the voice and the stories. We wanted to make something very rough around the edges and unpolished, a kind of documented swapping of songs…"
Of the track that gives its name to the project and album, he says: "I found these words in the Bodleian Archive and set them to my own melody. Green Ribbons were used to label people as 'insane' in the 1800s. I enjoyed the historical reference to mental health, a subject which features in some of my own writing. I liked, too, the directness of the lyric."
Green Ribbons is a vocal quartet dedicated to the celebration of unaccompanied song, featuring Debbie Armour (Burd Ellen), Frankie Armstrong, Alasdair Roberts and Benjamin "Jinnwoo" Webb (Jinnwoo, Bird in the Belly).
