Andrew Rumsey had been an Anglican vicar in England for six years when he earned a coveted spot in a 2007 songwriting workshop hosted by the Kinks’ Ray Davies. “We lived with him, had meals with him, and had to produce a song a day and perform for him every evening,” Andrew recalls. “It was intense.”
What got him accepted? “Down in the Effra,” a song he’d composed about a lost tributary of the Thames. Just the thing to appeal to a rock star famous for celebrating Waterloo sunsets and village greens.
Consecrated a bishop in 2019, Rumsey has also written well-received books about the sacredness of place. But it’s his music that most sets him apart from your typical man of the cloth. Acoustic textures, melancholy melodies, haunted vocals—it suggests what Nick Drake might’ve achieved if he’d overcome his inner vortex.
Places still loom large in his work. Several of the 16 songs on the good Bishop’s latest—yes, latest—album, Blank Arcades, draw on specific locations (“Trebarwith Strand,” “Juxon Street”) or landmarks (“Shirley Windmill,” “We Are the Sons of Temperance”). And, like his first two albums, Evensongs (2023) and Collodion (2025), Arcades was recorded in an historic church—Yatesbury this time, close to the megalithic stone circle of Avebury.
Ancient architectural acoustics and proximal spiritual energy aren’t the only reasons for the album’s shimmer. There’s also the vibe-capturing skill of Katie May, the Grammy-winning head engineer at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, located “just up the road” from Rumsey’s Wiltshire base. But it won’t be his base much longer: he’s recently been appointed Bishop of St. Albans.
“The announcement has just been mentioned in the Church Times,” he says, “and the headline is ‘Folk-singing Bishop Moves to St. Albans.’” Rumsey laughs. “A few years ago, I would have found that excruciating. And it still doesn’t sound great, does it? If I were my new churches, I’d be very afraid.”