Johnny Flynn, Lillie Flynn - Beam Cottage Johnny Flynn, Lillie Flynn

This is a record about a place. It is a record of a time.
Beam Cottage was home to Johnny and Lillie Flynn when they were children. It was home before a music scholarship took Johnny away from the family and before cancer took their father Eric from them.

Standing in the middle of a sleepy village in the south of England, Beam Cottage had played host to almost 400 years of life and death under its thatched roof.

“It had been built as a farmworker’s cottage, and the low ceilings meant that it felt like a hobbit house,” the siblings, who are both actors as well as musicians, say. “Our tall dad had a permanent stoop at home.”

The brother and sister went to primary school in the next village and at night they would look out from their bedroom window and see the moon reflecting off the River Test across the cornfields.

“We rented the cottage – our parents weren’t wealthy, and they never owned a house together – but when we remember a childhood home, this is it,” they say.

Beam Cottage was not to last forever though. Johnny’s music scholarship took him to boarding school and soon after, Lillie moved with their parents to Wales to run a B&B. Then, aged just 62, Johnny and Lillie’s father died.

Because of this, the brother and sister say, “the years at Beam Cottage feel like an idyll of happiness and togetherness before life began to feel more complicated and we were separated from each other”.

To take this place and time and capture it in song was only natural for the Flynns, both of whom have found success playing music and acting.

“There was always music and singing in the house and in the car,” they say. “Our parents both sung and played guitar and between them introduced us to a wide range of songs.”

Their father Eric also wrote songs, and it is his lullaby, “Sleepy Head”, that closes this record.

“He would sing us to sleep with it as he had done with our three older half- siblings 20 years before us,” the brother and sister say.
“And that song has sung Johnny’s children to sleep too - it’s felt like the grandfather they never knew has been singing to them across time and
space.”

The other tracks on Beam Cottage are either written by Johnny or Lillie or are covers of songs they grew up singing, whether in the car or round a fire.

These songs will often be familiar to those who know Johnny’s folk-infused albums, with Beam Cottage often evoking the at times ramshackle and at times closely emotional feeling of a music session in a local pub, with guitars clattering and chiming and fiddles rising and falling.

The covers include those of songs made famous by Johnny Mercer, Hank Williams, Billy Bragg and Simon and Garfunkel. Like many of the tracks on the album, they showcase the natural interplay between Johnny’s rasping baritone and Lillie’s clear soprano.

“We had a beaten up old red Ford Escort van at some point in the mid-90s and the left speaker didn’t work,” the brother and sister say, “so when we listened to early Simon and Garfunkel, which was hard panned in a stereo mix, we were missing Simon on the left and learnt to harmonise by imagining his part and singing along.”

Johnny would go on to open up for Paul Simon in Hyde Park with his band, which Lillie was a part of. Just two days after recording their hypnotic version of The Boy in the Bubble for Beam Cottage, Johnny got a call to say he’d been cast to play Simon in Bill Condon’s historical drama The Road Home.

While Lillie was always involved in Johnny’s recording and touring, the idea for Beam Cottage was “to stand alongside each other equally, to celebrate our friendship and connection”.

The Lady is Risen and Been Listening, two old songs of Johnny’s, have been given a new lease of life as duets.

Lillie’s song Brockwell Park, lilting, melodic and reflective, sees her daily walk round the park in south London become a musing on the state of the world and the state of her mind. “You see I do all my thinking in Brockwell Park,” she sings, as the light fades and the delicate guitar lines chime.

Johnny’s new song The Music of the Spheres – once the terrain of Ian Brown – is similarly about friendship, love and love lost, though it journeys to these familiar landscapes via the cosmos and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and features acclaimed pedal steel player Joe Harvey Whyte.

The Ghost of O’Donahue, another old song of Johnny’s, was written in Ireland almost 20 years ago but has had a rich and winding afterlife that casts it now in a whole new light.

“I went to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin and thought I saw a painting called or about a story named the ghost of O'Donoghue,” Johnny says. “I wrote this song in the back of the van looking out over the lush greenness of Ireland and thinking of my own family's journey away from Ireland.”

Then, last year, he discovered the writing of the Irish sage John O'Donoghue. Playing at a festival in Ireland, the author Manchán Magan approached Johnny and told him he liked his song about O’Donoghue.
“I said I didn't know it was about John O'Donoghue, I thought it was about a painting of a ghost I once saw,” Johnny recalls.

Magan told Johnny that he visited O’Donoghue on his deathbed in January 2008, at exactly the same time Johnny first wrote the song. Johnny became friends with the Irish author, before he died at the age of just 55 last October.

Hares on the Mountain is an old English folk song that sits easily in the Flynns’ canon, a “beautifully strange and sexy song” rooted in the land.

Tell Old Bill is a Black American blues folk song performed by a slew of famous names, with Johnny and Lillie namechecking Dave Van Ronk’s version then subverting it by having Lillie sing the lead vocal.

Beam Cottage features all the members of the Flynns’ wider band, currently known as the River Band, as well as the South African group The Joy.

Johnny and Lillie’s mother was from South Africa and so, the siblings say, “to have these incredible voices singing in Zulu and weaving with ours felt like a conversation with a culture we knew and loved from childhood”.

While Beam Cottage is an intensely personal evocation of a time and place, the presence of a song like Billy Bragg’s Between the Wars makes clear the social and political context that shades it.

Written during the miners’ strike of the mid-1980s, the song rings true today. “The time ‘between the wars’ feels like a tragically beautiful thing to consider as Trump bombs Iran and Israel inflicts an endless genocide on Palestine,” Johnny and Lillie say.

Even the beautiful chalk stream of the River Test, which the siblings spent every day in when they lived at Beam Cottage, is now monitored for pollution like so many others across Britain.

As touring musicians and actors, both Flynns were also drawn to Hank Williams’s Ramblin Man, whose lyrics “evoke a kind of demented need to keep moving... to never settle – and the heartbreak that might cause at home and in ourselves.”

Moon River, the Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer classic performed by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Frank Ocean, is given a new poignancy when performed by a brother and sister in perfect harmony.

“It’s a song we sing with Johnny’s kids,” the Flynns say. “At Christmas. At parties... These two souls – best friends drifting out across the world together. The tragedy of the potential separation from someone you love so much, which you can’t express.”

In the end, the album returns to the place, Beam Cottage, and the time, their early childhood, when Johnny and Lillie shared a bedroom and their father sang them to sleep.

In the lullaby Sleepyhead, which Johnny now sings to his own children, we are taken to see the seven wonders of the world and left with the sandman “singing sweet lullabies”.

We are returned, to Beam Cottage.