REVIEWS
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Bob Harris's (Radio 2) Whispers
'Mr & Mrs Haves were an unknown quantity to me. What an eye opener it proved to be. Great, great songs, an exceptional voice (Janis), perfectly blended harmonies & really nifty guitar playing (Geoff). All this and....they're British ?? Very few English people can really effectively capture the feel of this kind of music, let alone write songs like these as well.'
Dave Sedley (promoter) - Psychos at The Monkey Cafe
'In the two and a half years I've been running this club - that was one of the best songwriter sets I've heard - brilliant!'
HAVES & HAVES - Way Out West records
Janis and Geoff Haves are based near Kingston-upon-Thames, a lively suburb of south west London. Both are extremely experienced performers and musicians in their own right. Janis has toured most of Britain with her band the Ice Garden and later as one half of the infamous Nott Sisters an upfront 'girlpower' country influenced singer/songwriter project. Janis also appeared on Sky T.V.'s 'Where It's At' programme and was a featured artist on Radio 4a. Geoff has been a professional guitarist playing sessions and doing gigs for over 25 years. He has played on most of London's large stages including the Shepherds Bush Empire and Wembley Arena. After the Nott Sisters parted company, Janis and Geoff decided it was time to pool their resources and with Janis providing the songwriting and lead vocals and Geoff producing and playing all the guitars 'Haves & Haves' was born! Two years hard work followed, with the help of some great musician friends especially Graham Walker (Gary Moore band) on drums, Paul Westwood (Elton John band, author of 'The Bass Bible' and one of London's most top session musicians) on bass guitar, and talented producer/engineer Dave Dix (Black's hit single- 'It's a wonderful Life', Alison Moyet etc.) applying his expertise to the final mixing and mastering . The resulting album truly does what it was intended to do. Geoff's guitar work is layered and beautiful providing a perfect backdrop for Janis's crafted hook laden songs, and the whole album has an overiding sense of calm, warmth and confidence. There are powerful influences clearly evident from the American side of the pond, both in the songwrting and the guitar playing, but this album is absolutely not another American re-make, far from it, from the opening mysterious drama of 'Mississippi In The Spring' through the acoustic simplicity of 'Shameless' to the guitar driven 'cow- punk' energy of 'Gone' this is an album that truly has it's own voice - soft and sweet - loud and clear
David Mundell - Mundell Music
Folk World Magazine - Big Front Door : Janis Haves
The thing that strikes me about this album is that it is ideal material for consideration should they be wanting to bury a capsule that incorporated all that is quintessentially ENGLISH. Note that I said “English” and not “British”.
Janis has a pleasant warm voice that seems blissfully unmannered. And Praise God she is not singing in an English regional accent (about three notches up from the regional accent in which that performer would SPEAK!): but rather in RP (“Received Pronunciation”) English with diction that thus makes her splendidly readable lyrics (in white on charcoal grey in the liner booklet) a bit superfluous.
Janis and husband/producer Geoff Haves have built a solid reputation these past few years as performers. She has one of those sweet fragile voices: just like an English version of Irish songstress, Dana. Janis is a former staff writer of potential hit records at the famous Rockfield Studios in Monmouth. And it shows.
My favourite track is her opener. “Gwendoline” evokes the memory of her singing teacher. You might think it too personal a song for other artistes to pick up on: but no. It does not matter that you or I did not have a singing teacher called by this name: we can all relate to it. She marvellously evokes the kind of memory we ALL had as kids of certain people in our life. A mixture of love, respect and – yes, a little – FEAR too! I certainly felt just the same way about the lady who taught me piano as a small boy, and I am sure I would get much the same sensations should I return to her house today after half a century.
There is a commercial aspect to the sound of her songs: they all are knocking at the door of instant memorability (essential if one’s writing pop songs). Of course Janis will say that these songs (aimed incidentally at the memory of several now-deceased women who had made an impact on her life) are the very antithesis of pop. And of course they are: but that said, her knowledge that the HOOK is everything in pop, never leaves her. So “Waiting For Jesus” (a very serious song) has the catchiest of choruses.
She won’t thank me for saying that I see her voice as more Lynsey De Paul than Joan Baez! (Yes, dig myself out of THAT one! Well actually, I don’t have to: Lynsey De Paul was a very tuneful singer!)
But what the heck! Janis is NATURAL. She is a breath of fresh air
HAVES AND HAVES - Way Out West Records.
Listening to this album blind, for much of its length I could have sworn I was listening to a quality product from the Nashville fringe. It's classy and accessible pop-flavoured country-styled contemporary songwriting, and the majority of the songs hooked me straightaway. Imagine my surprise then, when I read the press handout to find that Haves And Haves are Janis and Geoff Haves, a husband-and-wife duo based in Kingston, Surrey. Both have a healthy pedigree within the music business already - Janis with the band Ice Garden and Geoff as a professional session guitarist for over 25 years - but have up to now deliberately resisted working together; this step was taken following a growing realisation that Janis was building up a hefty catalogue of songs. Hence this album, on which Janis writes all the material and sings while Geoff plays all the guitars and does some backing vocals, underpinned by the solid rhythm section of Paul Westwood (bass) and Graham Walker (drums) on most of the cuts and with one or two other guests on a handful of cuts. Geoff has a fine grasp of the art of subtle yet characterful accompaniment, some might say inspired by Buddy Miller. As well as a mighty fine songwriter, Janis is a pretty exceptional singer (a bit in the Emmylou Harris mould perhaps, with shades here and there of Maura Kennedy), possessing both delicacy and a great range, and an innate ability to get right inside the idiom, whether on the sublime, rippling Shameless or the soaring torch-ballads Turn Your Love Around and If That Were Me or the gutsy power-jangle of the tongue-in-cheek Car and An Evening Spent Alone (Dar Williams meets Lucy Kaplansky?) or the ache of Miss You. A superb début all told, which has been difficult to prise away from the CD player!
David Kidman - http://www.netrhythms.co.uk
BIG FRONT DOOR/Janis Haves - Angelic Music
Other half Geoff is still there on guitar and producing, but the follow up to their Haves & Haves debut is being accorded the solo spotlight because the songs derive from a very much more personal experience. Having written opening track Gwendoline, a portrait in song about her visits as a 13 year old to formidable singing teacher Miss Gwendoline Ayles-Ramsey and her wisteria strewn house with its big front door, Haves began to reflect on the other women who had helped shape her life and had since passed on.
And so a conceptually thematic album was born, embracing memories of feminist maiden aunts, poets, singers, a best friend's mum and her nan, the subject of the delicate tinkling In My Chair, sung in the person of her late widowed grandfather.
Although the popular blonde the singer resents and wishes she could be gets a name in the tumbling summery pop Mary and Me, most aren't quite that person specific. You certainly don't need access to her family tree or address book to relate to the child in a hurry to grow up in the 60s Greenwich Village folksy jangly waltz swaying Blind Leaving The Blind, the awe of a writer's skill in Write Those Words (where Brad Lang's upright bass works its own wonders), the stagnated dreams that never set sail in Tall Ships and the need to escape dead end towns that chugs through Older, or Waiting For Jesus's exhausted desire for death as an end to worldly troubles.
There's no hints of the Emmylou comparisons that the last album elicited and while her country affections are still evident on the likes of Older, it's steeped far more in suburbia's cul de sacs than open highways, Haves's phrasings and the often leafy folk melodies and arrangements (The Box, Chasing Rainbows) denoting a very English record with very English sensibilities. A door well worth the opening.
Mike Davies http://www.netrhythms.co.uk
THE GARDEN (Janis Haves) - Angelic Music
It's six years now since Janis Haves and husband Geoff released their duo debut, since when he seems to have steeped into the background, acting as producer and guitarist on her 2003 solo album Big Front Door. There's no sign of a Haves & Haves follow up, but the path from the door to the garden has led to a second totally solo outing with Geoff behind the desk once more.
Recorded live, often before the ink of the lyrics had dried on the page, as with its predecessor it's a lovely uncluttered affair, Haves' sweet country girlish voice enfolding a tapestry of pastoral English folk with twinkles of jazz (Sheridan's Bookshop), blues (Twisted Mind) and, on Don't Cry especially, even a suggestion of the pyschfolk of Nico-era Velvets.
Again too the songs paint everyday pictures, sometimes dark as on the dysfunctional genetic bloodlines of Christmas In London, achingly poignant on the break up of The Sun Went Down and the distracted widow's guilt of The Self Improvement Song. There's self-expression defiance on the spirited acoustic One Of Us and wistfully knowing insights with the tumbling, hymnal melody of the title track's observation on how life can take you by surprise just when you think you have it under control. A terrible pun I know, but you really should get yourself some aural horticulture.
Mike Davies http://www.netrhythms.co.uk
