Matt Berry: Witchazel [ACID JAZZ]

Why you'll love it

This is the Acid Jazz pressing of Witchazel, back in print for the first time in a while. Berry plays most of it himself, and it opens with "Take My Hand", the song that became the theme to his own sitcom Toast of London.

This edition

• Acid Jazz repress of the 2011 album
• Fourteen tracks across two sides, including "Take My Hand" and "The Pheasant"

About the album

Before most of the world knew Matt Berry as the booming voice of What We Do in the Shadows, he was quietly making records in the spirit of late-'60s English folk rock. Witchazel, his third album, first turned up as a free download on his own website in March 2009, and Acid Jazz gave it a proper physical life two years later. Berry recorded it between 2009 and 2010 on Jacob's Island by the Thames, and plays most of the instruments himself: fuzz guitar, Mellotron-ish swells, recorder and the odd pastoral drum break.

He has said the album is about "the terrors of the countryside", and you can hear it in songs like "The Badger's Wake" and "Accident at a Harvest Festival". Fellow comic Peter Serafinowicz turns up on "Rain Came Down" doing a Paul McCartney impression, credited as "Paul Mcartney", which tells you roughly how seriously the liner notes take themselves. The songs, though, are the real thing, warm and melodic and quite lovely.

"Take My Hand" went on to open every episode of Toast of London, and an instrumental take had already drifted through Berry's earlier series Snuff Box. Few sitcom themes have aged into a proper folk-rock single; this one did, and nobody involved seems more surprised than we are.

Tracklist

Listen

Out August 28, 2026 on Acid Jazz (cat# AJXLP251), a reissue of the 2011 album.