The Covid lockdowns left a lot of us looking for something to occupy our time, and Tim's answer to that question was a four-track folk EP, adapting four of the pieces from The English and Scottish Popular Ballads collected in the late 19th Century by Francis James Child - the collection is popularly referred to as 'the Child Ballads', which Tim riffed on in the EP's title Child's Play (no relation to the horror film of the same name).
The reason why the clock is showing five minutes past three is because the same time shown on a digital clock would be '3:05', and there are 305 songs in Child's collection. The oak sprig and thistle, of course, represent England and Scotland respectively; I suppose we could have chosen a football hooligan and a plate of haggis instead, but that would have been a bit tasteless so we didn't.
Tim has decided, with two or three years' hindsight, that the EP wasn't his best work, so it isn't available to listen to online anymore. However, in some ways it served as an important precursor to his PhD thesis project Green Grow the Rushes, most obviously in the fact that both EPs featured versions of Scarborough Fair. And Tim tells me he still likes the cover artwork I did for the 2020 version, so here it is.
