We’ve given up on the albums-only reviews. We get too much good stuff that needs to be talked about. Perhaps it is the name, or maybe it is just what a brew really means in the UK. Who knows. Either way, here we are with Brick Turpin.

Brick Turpin isn't a stage name dreamed up for effect. The man has spent decades as a traditional English tradesman, restoring historic buildings, and only picked up songwriting to go alongside it. DRUM UP A BREW is the kind of title that sounds like a joke until you sit with it. It isn't really about tea. It's about the ritual that holds a job, a crew, and a trade together, and what gets lost when nobody's left to teach the next person how to make it.

Maybe we’re reading too much into the whole thing, or maybe we’re right to consider simple things, like a properly brewed cuppa, to be more than leaves in a cup.

That's the whole project in miniature. Turpin's catalogue, debut album WORKDAY chief among it, is built from stories he's picked up from tradesmen over the years: the characters, the traditions, the slow disappearance of skills that used to get passed hand to hand and mostly don't anymore. He puts it plainly himself: if we don't fight for the people who uphold these traditions, we're in danger of losing something we can't easily get back.

Musically we're in familiar territory: voice, guitar, not much else in the way. It's a style that rewards patience; it also rewards a few runs of the same song. His earlier single LIKE NATURAL MATERIALS DO got singled out elsewhere for leaning on plain, earthy language instead of anything clever or clinical, and DRUM UP A BREW sounds cut from the same cloth. It's a small song doing a lot of quiet work.

One detail for the punks in the audience: WORKDAY was mixed by Rat Scabies, drummer for The Damned. Not the collaborator you'd expect on a folk record about bricklaying, and exactly the kind of detail that makes us like this more.

Turpin's also a filmmaker on the side. His documentary AN ENGLISHMAN'S HOME, about Tudor buildings, went up on YouTube earlier this year, which tracks: a man this invested in the history of a trade was always going to end up behind a camera too. He spent this summer on the folk and sea shanty festival circuit off the back of WORKDAY, which is a decent sign that this isn't a bedroom project.

It has taken us a while to get around to writing this review. And between hearing Drum Up A Brew and now, we had the joy of watching his tour diary. Well, part 1 anyway.

Perhaps it is the homesickness speaking, but seeing an artist on the road, driving between very, very British festivals is…something. Many moons ago, the workings mens clubs, cobs with cheddar and onion, ale, condensation dripped on table tops, cig smoke gathering on the ceiling. Steel-toed boots, worn jeans, dirt-stained hands… You know they’d had a day of it. And you just as well knew that someone at the other end of it was hanging up a blazer - and you also knew good and well which one did the work and which one had the money.

But back to the music. We’re so used to people singing about shooting, drugs, and women or heartbreak and boytoys that it is now more surprising that someone writes and sings about scaffolding. Except this comes from a long-standing tradition of folk ballads encompassing the hardships, the complaints of the workers, and the skills that go into it… did we forget?

Are the vocals and the instruments going to blow you away? No. They’re not glamorous; they’re not fiddled with to an inch of their lives. They’re just solid, traditional folk ballads with some sea shanty style thrown in for good measure. The artist in this case like the trade, maybe.