Album Review: Paul Mosley and The Red Meat Orchestra – Monkey Hanger

As inventive and sophisticated as this album is, I’d say that a bit of explanation is needed before I go any further.

The title of the album comes from a particular piece of the folklore of England’s North-East. It originates in a possibly apocryphal tale about how the 18th-century inhabitants of a town called Hartlepool killed a monkey, believing it to be a foreign spy. The phrase lives on, not always in a complimentary way, to refer to people of the region.

On what is his eleventh solo album and fifth with The Red Meat Orchestra, Paul Mosley uses how the phrase has evolved to become a mark of pride, not shame or embarrassment, to frame a specific and pivotal time in his own life.

Over its twelve songs, it looks at subjects like memory, belonging, and growing up gay in the industrial North East of England in the 1980s. As well as being a time of great personal change for the artist, the area was also undergoing seismic, if not catastrophic, events as the industries that held towns and communities together were suddenly closing.

The loss of a traditional culture, of finding yourself along the way, is one shared with places like West Virginia and Pennsylvania, is an unspoken bond that can be heard in the Americana and folk influences that Mosley and his collaborators (you can see them in the header picture) have added to chamber pop and English folk heard here.

It’s how you get a series of songs that finds itself in the company of classics like Fairport Convention’s Unhalfbricking and John Prine’s The Tree of Forgiveness. Similar to those albums, it looks at the past from the present, making sense of times that were sometimes turbulent, yet formative.

Other influences on the album are just as open but more playful, as on What Would Harry Nilsson Say?, which illustrates the way 70s troubadours like Nilsson, Randy Newman, Cat Stevens, and others would use a range of instrumentation to add a theatrical flair to their music. Mosley has written scores for puppet theatre, and I suspect the need to add colour, as well as emotion, through deftly composed arrangements and striking instruments used has played a role within Monkey Hanger.

It’s a very personal album, with vivid images of life when he was growing up, tying scenes and memories into an overall, loose narrative that carries moments of insight and reflection and may echo our own lives at times.  

“The album is based around one dark night in 1989,” reveals Mosley about Monkey Hanger. “I’m alone on the beach trying to work out who I am… or escape from it. So, the songs are me, now, speaking to me then.”

“I wanted it to be funny as that’s such a big part of the Hartlepool personality, but I also wanted to tell that kid’s story properly. I was surprised how much I remembered, how much I wished I could tell him that it would all, eventually, be OK.”

Monkey Hanger was released on the 31st of July, 2026, and can be heard on Bandcamp and Spotify. To learn more about Paul Mosley and his music, make your way to his Facebook and Instagram socials.