We're all waiting. Everybody waits. Hospitals. Train stations. Ferries. Care Homes. Life itself is a waiting room.

Singer and songwriter Samantha Whates recorded her sophomore album Waiting Rooms entirely on location in a sequence of waiting rooms; some active, some abandoned. The album addresses themes of loss and waiting, life in transition and time passing in transient spaces.

The first recording took place in Dunoon in Scotland, a stunning Victorian ferry waiting room in the Cowal peninsula of Argyll and Bute; the second overnight in an art deco waiting room at one end of the tube line; the third took place in Great Ormond Street Hospital with a full band in the public waiting room on a busy Sunday; the fourth was at Hebden bridge platform 2, a bustling Friday afternoon full of pensioners and commuters, a public piano in the corner long untuned and prepared especially. The fifth took place in Peckham Rye old waiting room, a cavernous, dilapidated listed space the size of a Victorian music hall, long shuttered and visible only on hidden London weekends and hauntology blogs.

The final session, in the depths of winter in a subterranean prison, a court holding area long abandoned …

Each of these sessions was its own unique moment, with a story all its own, a bespoke coterie of musicians with arrangements tailored for place, blending live takes, field
recording and atmospherics.

Whates was followed at every turn throughout this 3 year undertaking by filmmaker Julius Beltrame, and her brother and engineer Douglas Whates.

Songs of hope, of community. Folk music in the sense of peoples' music, captured in the places where people live and work and spend their daily lives. Spaces that are transient, communal, civic, utilitarian, blankly anonymous and intimately personal.

An album and a project of some prescience perhaps; in 2018 it seemed a canny turn of phrase to think of life as a waiting room, the disingenuous political machinations a timely metaphor, it felt like a psychogeographer’s affectation.

Then the country itself became a waiting room. Our lives. Our homes. Our futures. Paused.

Collectively we sat and waited. And now emerge blinking into whatever awaits us; artists, musicians, venues, whole industries without work or clear direction of what's to come.

Is this a time of hope, of opportunity? Of change? Shuffling dazed again out into the streets, a place we left abandoned a year ago feels contracted, smaller, meaner somehow. England stands dishevelled, shuttered, closed and sold.

For many Britain feels a little meaner and a little shabbier. For many it offers fresh hope, a time for a new start.

Where awaits us beyond this waiting room?