Ma Polaine’s Great Decline are Beth Packer and Clinton Hough, a Somerset duo making genre-straddling beauty, dark and light, since 2011.
Beth grew up in Cornwall, singing Brenda Wootton’s folk songs as a child before her father’s record collection led her to Nina Simone, Kate Bush and Pink Floyd to name a few. Clinton grew up in London’s jazz and blues scene, seeing Muddy Waters as a child and jazz greats at Ronnie Scott’s as a teenager. They met in August 2010, when he joined her soul and blues band. In February 2011 a failed attempt to rework the blues classic “My Babe” wandered off and became “Pigfoot Blues”, the first Ma Polaine song. It didn’t fit the old set, so it had to belong to something new. Song after song followed. Five studio albums and five EPs on, the songs keep coming.
Someone once said they sound “like a young Billie Holiday gate-crashing a Tom Waits Swordfishtrombones recording session”. Not far off. Beth’s emotive voice carries abstract tales, wry humour and raw beauty, with her double bass anchoring the sound. Clinton’s guitar answers with rich chords, gritty riffs and room to breathe. As an independent band they’re free to write what they like, and they do.
Monster Swan, their fifth studio album, came out in February 2026 with a bluesier edge. Nine of its eleven songs were recorded in two days at their own studio, Ma Polaine HQ. Of the love song “Told You Lately”, they say: “It’s about the people who matter most, and making sure they actually know it.”
Fatea Magazine named them Best Band/Duo, they’ve had airplay on 6 Music and Cerys Matthews’ Radio 2 Blues Show, and MOJO described them as “sufficiently unhinged to keep you guessing”.
Songs with some mileage, in a room where you can hear every word. And who, exactly, is Ma Polaine?
MOJO Magazine – 4 stars. “Ma Polaine’s Great Decline have evolved a pop-folk-blues-americana style that is warmly familiar, yet is sufficiently unhinged to keep you guessing…”
Morning Star – 5 stars. “Packer’s voice has a superb range, but it is her interpretative skill that entrances, with the effortless shifts that imbue her evocative lyrics with rare emotional charge”.
Folk Radio UK – “..an album to be cherished, replete with enchanting musical treats around every corner”.
Blues Matters – “This is 21st-century music chock full of mystery and acute observation”.
