Pump Street

Ottawa, Ontario, Summer 2002. A group of alumni from St. Gregory’s Academy gathered to record some of the folk songs that they learned at the Academy and had come to love in a new way during their college days. They met the night before the studio session, put together a list, played through a few songs, and went in the next day to play off the floor rough and ready, just as they were, without rehearsal or recording experience. Their enjoyment and energy come through loud and clear in this early alumni album, raw in places, elevating and even humorous in others, and shot through with youthful zeal and a living musical tradition. They named the collection after Pump Street, the fictional street in Notting Hill that Adam Wayne defended to the death in G. K. Chesterton’s first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, evoking a homecoming piety for these old tunes and their old school.