My Firsts is our email interview series where we ask musicians to tell us about their first life experiences, be it early childhood ones (first word, first concert, etc.) or their first tastes of being a musician (first band, first tour, etc.). For this My Firsts we talk to Benjamin Woods, the main creative force behind England's The GOLDEN DREGS.
The GOLDEN DREGS released a new album, On Grace & Dignity, in February via 4AD, their first album for the label. It follows 2018's Lafayette and 2019's Hope Is For The Hopeless. Woods founded the project in 2013 in Falmouth, a seaside town in his native Cornwall in southest England. Although he's currently based in South London, in 2020, as the pandemic took hold, Woods lost his day job and had to move back in with his parents in Truro, Cornwall. The only job he could get was on a badly run building site, but that helped influence the new album.
“It was such a bleak winter—waist-deep in mud digging holes and rolling out turf on top of building waste, really grim stuff, which became the