Miner Notes : Briton Jez Lowe Recounts the Hard Times Back Home With Softness and Warmth

In one of the memorably catty song refrains of recent pop history, rock band Cracker had this to say about the ever-growing legion of sensitive souls seeking to pour their hearts out over a strummed guitar:

What the world needs now is another folk singer,

Like I need a hole in the head.

What the world needs now is a new Frank Sinatra,

So I can get you in bed.

Jez Lowe is another folk singer, but not just another folk singer. This 16-year veteran of the British folk circuit, who only last year began to put out records in the United States, is making a distinctive mark by singing about hard times in a soft voice.

Those who hear Lowe’s two American releases--”Bad Penny,” a 1995 reissue of a 1988 album, and the recent “Tenterhooks”--will, in fact, draw an undeniable link between this folk singer and the drilling of holes.

Not holes in the head, and not holes in Blackburn, Lancashire (although the Beatles were Lowe’s chief inspiration for picking up the guitar at age 10), but holes in the rock faces of his home region of Durham, in the northeast of England.

Lowe, 40, grew up there in the coal-mining village of Easington. He didn’t follow the vast majority of his schoolmates into the mines (much to the relief of his father, a coal miner).

But the sorrows and deprivations of struggling English miners and their families form the specific backdrop for many a Lowe song. While nourished by local color, his writing is broad in appeal, thanks to inviting tunes, an uncommonly gentle and warm delivery and the fact that, in terms of human impact, there really isn’t that much difference between a closed-down northern English coal mine and, say, a downsized Southern California aerospace plant.

Speaking by phone Wednesday from a friend’s house in San Jose, where he had just arrived after a flight from London, Lowe cited the “Tenterhooks” track, “Sweep Horizons Clean,” as an example of his method, in which the experience of his small, mining town gives texture and immediacy to, but doesn’t limit, the songwriting.

“It’s about a relationship in those circumstances--the closing of the mines and dying of the community,” said Lowe, who plays in Orange County for the first time Sunday when he and his three-member backing band, the Bad Pennies, appear at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments. “I wouldn’t just go on about the closing of the mines, and I probably wouldn’t just go on about a relationship. I try to bring both together in one song.”

“Tenterhooks,” on the respected, Connecticut-based Celtic and folk-music label Green Linnet, and “Bad Penny,” on a small Portland, Ore.-based label, Firebird Music, are mainly downcast albums in which economic adversity, old age, separation from home or romantic disaster exact a toll on Lowe’s closely drawn characters.

But for all the bitter experience underlying the music, and the pointed political implications he draws, Lowe’s airy tenor registers empathy, rather than anger. His light, imaginative touch as a lyric writer and his strong ear as a melodist keep things from getting dreary.

“There’s a lot of resilience, a lot of humor that comes out of this poverty and hardship,” Lowe said of the regions where the conservative British government has closed unprofitable mines in recent years, putting thousands of people out of work.

“For all that things are a bit desperate, they still have a way of looking at life that helps them survive, and I try to do that in the songs, by not having it all gloom and doom.”

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Besides being rich in coal, the region where Lowe grew up offered lots of opportunities for a musician versed in traditional folk music to be heard.

“It’s the part of England where the [‘60s] folk revival started. You could go [to a folk club] any night, and anybody could get up [and play]. There was a ready-made audience. By the age of 16, I was in the clubs.”

For his first seven years as a performer, Lowe stuck to singing traditional ballads. He branched into songwriting because “I knew I wasn’t going to be the best singer and guitar player in the world, but if I had some songs nobody else was doing, people would come and hear them.”

In 1980, he put out the first of his 10 albums. The first of numerous American trips came in 1983. But until now, Lowe didn’t have an American label to promote him or distribute his music.

The Bad Pennies came together in 1990, adding an array of harmonies and instrumental colors to Lowe’s sound. Backup singer Bev Sanders figures prominently and adds some lead vocals; Billy Surgeoner plays fiddle and keyboards; his bass-playing brother, Bob, recently left the band to pursue more lucrative opportunities making and selling hi-fi speakers; Jeremy Luton is the new bassist. Lowe plays guitar, cittern and harmonica; the dulcimer and banjo he adds on record have been left home for the sake of lighter traveling.

Lowe said that “there’s a lot more power” in his live shows than comes through on his records with the Bad Pennies.

“I always go in wanting to make the albums a bit tougher, but they always come out as they do,” with a delicate sound. “I’m happy with that now. It’s kind of a distinctive thing. I prefer to understate things, anyway, in writing as well as the delivery. I’d rather put a gentle message across. I think those can hit as hard as a loud, shouting kind of song.”

Lowe’s work has begun to get around. The venerable English folk-rock band Fairport Convention recorded one of his songs, “London Danny,” and Lowe says he often receives CDs or tapes from lesser-known folk acts that have covered his material.

“I get CDs sent from Japan, New Zealand--people singing these songs that were written about this little village in the north of England. Not that I’m established or anything now, but I feel I’m getting somewhere, and it’s the songs, rather than me, that’s done it.”

Lowe said that the miners he writes about proved to be one of his most skeptical audiences. “A Small Coal Song,” from “Bad Penny,” recounts the reaction he got from some hometown friends who questioned his credentials for singing about the mining life.

“They weren’t too nasty about it, but they asked, ‘How come this guy’s singing all these songs about the community and coal mining, when he was never a coal miner and he’s never around?’ ”

“A Small Coal Song” gives Lowe’s miner friends their say, both about his outsider status when it comes to the mines, and their regrets at the hardship of being, all too literally, insiders.

“It became a damage-limitation song,” Lowe said. “If I had a song admitting to [his lack of direct experience], nobody could criticize me. And that’s more or less what happened. That song helped me a lot to reach the people I was singing about.”

* Jez Lowe and the Bad Pennies play Sunday at 7 p.m. at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments, 28062 Forbes Road, Suite D, Laguna Niguel. $15. (714) 364-5270. Also, Wednesday at the Ash Grove, 250 Santa Monica Pier, Santa Monica. (310) 656-8501.