08/11/2024
Coming up this week on FAAB:
Kate Meaw - Borthwick - Umbelliferæ - Meaw Records www.kateyoungmusic.com
Kathryn Tickell - Sycamore Gap - Return To Kielderside - Resilient Records www.kathryntickell.com/
Fionn Regan- Islands - O Avalanche - Nettwerk Music Groupwww.fionnregan.com/
Shovel Dance Collective - Kissing's Nae Sin / Newcastle / Portsmouth (Come, Come, My Brave Boys) - The Shovel Dance - American Dream Records www.shovel.dance/
Roddy Woomble - Still Painting A Picture of You - Sometime During The Night We Fell Off The Map - www.roddywoomble.net
Paul Kelly - Love Has Made A Fool Of Me - Fever Longing Still - Cooking Vinyl www.paulkelly.com.au/
Kate Young - Mountain - Umbelliferæ - video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXcEJHBrSrw
Kathryn Tickell - Dick Moscrop's Fiddle~The Steel - Return To Kielderside - video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD9z7Qk-ESE
Fionn Regan - Farewell - O Avalanche - video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfnFbV62rtE
Shovel Dance Collective - Four Loom Weaver - The Shovel Dance - video: www.youtube.com/channel/UCXt4NJBZcRpRpOPSV7E8DBg
Roddy Woomble - I Can Make Sense of It Now - Sometime During The Night We Fell Off The Map - video: www.youtube.com/channel/UCuEa30rAaq4ut5i_79oqhCw
Paul Kelly - Taught By Experts - Fever Longing Still - video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t0msWtT0DI
Kate Young: "Growing up immersed within a Folk music background in Edinburgh, Kate Young has emerged as one Scotland’s most innovative composers and musicians. She is driven by the exploration of new sounds found in traditional musics around the globe, which feed into her compositional world. As a musician, Kate combines voice with fiddle-playing techniques to conjure intriguing soundscapes as she navigates her way across musical genres.
A recipient of the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Award for Composers 2018, Kate has also toured globally with bands such as Moulettes, (Eliza Carthy MBE) Carthy, Hardy, Farrell & Young, Kathryn Tickell & The Darkening, Hannah James’s JigDoll Ensemble. In 2015-16 she collaborated with ten folk musicians from Scotland and England, all women, for Songs of Separation, a record which gained ‘Album of the Year’ at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Award in 2017. Her own band (previously known as Kate in the Kettle) is focussed on her combining of composition for string quintet and song.
Over the last five years she has developed her interests in British plant lore and folktales, learning directly from books and then weaving information into her songs and compositions as a means to perpetuate and empower traditions at high risk of being lost. In 2016 she completed a significant commission for Celtic Connections’s New Voices and wrote a suite of pieces around the theme of the natural world. Her response – a complete repertoire of songs inspired by British medicinal plants, set to string quintet, with harp, double bass and percussion – was met with wide acclaim.
More recently, Kate has endeavoured to continue extending her creative and compositional research by studying a Masters’ degree in Scenography in Utrecht, Netherlands." - www.kateyoungmusic.com/about/
Kathryn Tickell: "In 1984, while still at school, Kathryn Tickell released her first album ‘On Kielder Side’. 40 years on she revisits some of those tunes and responds with new material specially composed for this anniversary release ‘Return to Kielderside'.
Kathryn says “it is such a delight to take that old-school approach to recording an album – get a load of tunes together, and a group of good friends – play through the tunes…and go and record them. No studio trickery. No messing!”
Return to Kielderside is a gentle return to a more traditional sound for Kathryn. The album is a departure from the drums, samples and heavy bass beats of Kathryn’s current touring band ‘The Darkening’ although three tracks do feature The Darkening’s Amy Thatcher on accordion. Other contributors include melodeon player Julian Sutton, who played on several of Kathryn’s earlier albums, guitarist Ian Stephenson who last recorded with Kathryn back in 2007 and pianist Andy May (who also played Northumbrian pipes on Kathryn’s 2002 album ‘Back to the Hills’). Alongside these long-time friends and musical collaborators Kathryn is pleased to welcome young fiddle player Jem Quilley, making his recording debut.
Return to Kielderside contains old tunes like ‘Kielder Castle’ interspersed with contemporary tunes in traditional style such as the waltz Yearning Law and the rollicking accordion and pipes duet ‘Roman Wall Rambo’, composed for one of Kathryn’s relatives. The evocative air ‘Border Spirit’ is one of several tunes making a return from the original ‘On Kielder Side’ track list, all with new arrangements.
This time last year the iconic Sycamore Gap tree was felled. The tree, a symbol of the Northumbrian landscape, was cut down in an act of vandalism, leaving a deep void in the hearts of many in the region and beyond.
Kathryn says: "It all started nearly a year ago when I woke up to an avalanche of messages. The news of the Sycamore Gap tree being cut down had spread like wildfire and everyone was in shock. People started asking me if I was going to write a tune for the tree, and I realised that this was something I could do to honour its memory."
The tune will also be on the forthcoming album 'Return to Kielderside', but this is a different, less traditional mix incorporating field recordings from around Hadrian's Wall. Return to Kielderside was recorded in Thropton, Northumberland in Summer 2024." - www.kathryntickell.bandcamp.com
Fionn Regan: "Although he'd been releasing high-quality independent EPs since 2000, Irish singer/songwriter Fionn Regan rose to prominence in 2006 with his Mercury Prize-nominated debut album The End of History. His literate, often poetic indie folk subsequently earned him praise in the U.S. as well, with Lost Highway issuing it stateside a year later. When Lost Highway refused to release his follow-up, Regan shelved it and returned to Ireland where he released a trio of well-received LPs including 2010's more rock-driven The Shadow of an Empire and the self-recorded and entirely acoustic The Bunkhouse, Vol. 1: Anchor Black Tattoo. After a temporary hiatus, he returned in the late 2010s with the atmospheric folk-pop of 2017's The Meetings of the Waters and 2019's dreamy Cala.
Born and raised in the coastal city of Bray, Ireland, Regan absorbed folk and blues influences alongside the usual rock & roll (in interviews, he has claimed inspiration ranging from Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie to the Velvet Underground and Nirvana) due to his artistic family's bohemian existence living and working at a seaside resort hotel. Picking up piano, violin, and guitar at an early age from his musician father, Regan was performing in public before he reached his tenth birthday and busking across the country by his mid-teens. Resettling in Brighton, England, he signed with the small indie Anvil Records and released two EPs, 2003's Reservoir and 2004's Hotel Room, before connecting with the more established Bella Union imprint. In search of a live, natural sound, Regan recorded his debut album, The End of History, largely in an abandoned stone barn. The album was released in Great Britain in the summer of 2006, garnering considerable praise and regular comparisons to both Damien Rice and Nick Drake, as well as two hit singles in "Put a Penny in the Slot" and "Be Good or Be Gone." Lost Highway scheduled the American release of The End of History for summer 2007. Regan set about recording a follow-up in 2008 for Lost Highway, but upon its completion they refused to release it. The record, often referred to as The Red Tapes, has never seen an official release. Regan chose to retreat to Ireland to record his next record without the involvement of a label. The Shadow of an Empire was eventually released in 2010 via Heavenly Recordings and was warmly received by the music press. 2011 and 2012 saw the release of two further records, the expansive 100 Acres of Sycamore and the spare, lo-fi The Bunkhouse, Vol. 1: Anchor Black Tattoo. This prolific period was followed by a five-year gap which saw Regan charting a new creative course. When he emerged in 2017 with The Meetings of the Waters, he had shifted toward a deeply atmospheric, electronic-laced sound that embraced shimmering pop as much as pastoral folk. 2019's Cala was a more intimate affair, meditating on themes of nature and the sea." - Fionn Regan Biography by Stewart Mason www.allmusic.com/artist/fionn-regan-mn0000935894
Shovel Dance Collective: "The Shovel Dance, the second LP from London's nine-piece folk group Shovel Dance Collective, is their most powerful release to date, bringing studio fidelity and trickery to the rich arrangements and soaring vocals of their concerts. While their work has always had an inventive bent, The Shovel Dance unifies the band’s experimentation with their live immediacy. Indeed, what sets The Shovel Dance apart is the Collective itself. The album revolves around their interplay and close listening, no matter how many members of the band play on a given song or how many instruments feature (there are twenty-five instruments and eight voices). The band are attentive to the English, Irish and Scottish sources they reference, which date back to the 1600s and beyond. At the same time, they give their arrangements an experimental edge—as close to Scott Walker or Swans as Shirley Collins or Bert Lloyd—that situates them on the bleeding edge of folk music.
“It clicked immediately when we first played together,” the band says. It traces its origins to Daniel S. Evans playing card games and tunes with Alex McKenzie and Joshua Barfoot. “Somehow,” the band says, “we always reached together towards the sublime. This was before there was a folk scene for young weirdos like ourselves.” The group grew naturally into its nine-piece membership—which, in addition to Evans, McKenzie and Barfoot, includes Fidelma Hanrahan, Jacken Elswyth, Oliver Hamilton, Tom Hardwick-Allan, and the group’s lead vocalists, Nick Granata and Mataio Austin Dean. Together, they landed on central ideas to explore as Shovel Dance Collective. Within their aesthetic commitment to acoustic instruments, “we want to play and experiment, layer and move between different spaces in recording, and extend the limits of our instruments to sing and break in new ways,” the group says. “Improvising, textural playing, and moving as one free organic organism are all part of the experiments we try and make in form. It’s all towards this one goal: constructing the Shovel Dance world and saying what we feel needs saying.”
These recordings have a confidence honed through the band’s tireless performance schedule across Europe. Take the “Abbots Bromley Horn Dance,” which leads off The Shovel Dance. Traditionally, it’s a celebratory dance for ten people, with ancient reindeer antlers and a hobby horse, and two musicians playing accordion and triangle. The band extends it into a four-part instrumental doom folk proclamation, waxing and waning between birdsong and a quiet minor-key meditation that builds into a lush, roiling crescendo. Then the bottom falls out into silence, and a quiet pipe organ introduces “The Worms Crept Out,” a World War I song about a decomposing body, as Granata sings. This is as much the album’s opening track as a musical mission statement for the band: first, folk music is living, even—or especially—when it’s about death. And interpreting folk music with emotion and present-day musical textures connects the music to its forebears. Nowhere is this more true than on "The Four Loom Weaver." Performed unaccompanied by Austin Dean, the song inhabits the perspective of a weaver who’s lost his job to steam-powered weaving machines, reduced by his poverty to eating nettles. A fellow weaver, afraid to confront their boss, says, “We might have better luck if we’d just hold our tongues.” The speaker responds, “I’ve holden my tongue ’til I near lost my breath, and I feel in my own heart I’ll soon clem [or starve] to death.” As Austin Dean moves between quiet vocal fry and the top of his baritone, he imbues the music with a piercing sense of familiarity connecting the past and the present, transcending space and time. “By having this spatio-temporal sense of folk music,” the group says, “we can reject a linear time, and promote new ways of looking at land and history to highlight the struggle of oppressed peoples everywhere.“
Shovel Dance Collective are among several working bands that function as a leaderless collective, but they’re unique for the beauty, force, and political charge of their folk music. “Folk music,” the band says, “places you in a great chain of everyday life, and how it can relate so intimately to political and emotional actions, past and present.” And what's more, “it infers a beautiful collectivity.” The Shovel Dance brings the band’s collectivity to its fullest realization yet." - www.shovel.dance/
Roddy Woomble: "Singer Roddy Woomble achieved recognition in the late '90s and early 2000s as the frontman for Scottish rock band Idlewild, who released a handful of albums before Woomble chose to explore his options as a solo artist. Born in 1976 in Scotland, Woomble traveled extensively as a child, living in France and the United States before settling in Edinburgh to study photography. It was in Edinburgh that he met the other future members of Idlewild, forming the band in 1995. They released five albums while shifting from a grungy, punk-rooted sound to folk-influenced rock. Building on that change, Woomble decided to take time out to explore his love of traditional Scottish folk and concentrate on solo material, which led to the release of his debut, My Secret Is My Silence, in July 2006. Among the collaborators on the album were Idlewild guitarist Rod Jones, vocalist Kate Rusby, and Woomble's wife, bassist Ailidh Lennon of Sons and Daughters.
My Secret Is My Silence topped the U.K. folk charts, encouraging Woomble to return to the folk genre after the 2007 release of Idlewild's fifth album, Make Another World. This time, he partnered with two other folksingers, Kris Drever and John McCusker, both of whom shared equal billing with Woomble on 2008's Before the Ruin. Continuing his musical juggling act, Woomble switched his attention back to Idlewild, who had lost their contract with Sanctuary Records after the label was absorbed by Universal Music Group. Forced to move ahead as an independent band, they completed their next album, Post Electric Blues, and released it on their website in June 2009. An "official" version of the album followed in December, courtesy of a new relationship with the indie label Cooking Vinyl. One month later, Woomble began writing songs for his second solo album, retaining the folksy flavor of My Secret Is My Silence while exploring a more electric sound. The result, The Impossible Song & Other Songs, appeared in early 2011.
Woomble put together a new band for his solo projects -- Seonaid Aitken on violin and keyboards, Sorren Maclean on guitar, Gavin Fox on bass, and Danny Grant on drums -- and took them into the studio to record his third solo LP, 2013's Listen to Keep. A 2014 concert by Woomble and his band (now featuring guitarist Maclean along with new members Hannah Fisher on fiddle, Craig Ainslie on bass, and Luciano Rossi on piano) was released as the limited-edition Live at King's Place in August 2014. Idlewild reconvened after a hiatus, and Woomble joined them to record their seventh album, 2015's Everything Ever Written, and subsequent touring. Woomble returned to his solo career, moving in a darker and more personal direction for his fourth studio effort as a solo artist, 2017's The Deluder. Following its release, he returned to Idlewild to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the release of The Remote Part before they started work on their ninth album, Interview Music. The band celebrated their 25th anniversary in 2020, but live dates to their shows were cancelled due to COVID-19. Woomble used that time to finish work on the official Idlewild biography, In the Beginning There Were Answers: 25 Years of Idlewild, and to start work on his fifth solo album. Stepping away from the acoustic folk of his previous work, he embarked on a more experimental journey, bringing synths, brass, and spoken word into the mix. The result, Lo! Soul, was issued in mid-2021. " - Roddy Woomble Biography by Kenyon Hopkin at www.allmusic.com/artist/roddy-woomble-mn0000315768
Paul Kelly: "With each song Paul Kelly writes, he feels like he’s starting anew. Every one a puzzle to be solved, a mystery that can be never quite explained. That adventurous spirit makes his 29th studio album, Fever Burning Still, as rich and rewarding a listening experience as any record he has made since releasing his first in 1981.
Few songwriters find ways to keep that creative fever burning for as long and as brightly as Kelly.
The country of his birth, its emotional interior and geographical landscape, its heroes and villains, our hopes and failings, have been a constant in Kelly’s long list of Australian-set songs. From St Kilda to King’s Cross, Adelaide, Leaps and Bounds, Incident on South Dowling, Maralinga (Rainy Land), Randwick Bells, Sydney from a 747. Fromthe bus ride through the cane in To Her Door tothe childhoodmemory of Deeper Water.
He has written about the country’s greatest cricketer, Bradman, and its most infamous bushranger, Ned Kelly, in Our Sunshine.
Some songs take their time to make their mark. How to Make Gravy, a message from a prisoner who can’t be home for Christmas, wasn’t a hit at the time of release in 1996 but now is recognised as an Australian classic. From Little Things Big Things Grow, aboutthe 1966 strike by Aboriginal stockmen on Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory, co-written with Kev Carmody, has taught more Australians about the history of the battle for land rights than newspaper headlines ever could.
And when Kelly finds a theme, he goes all in. His 2021 album, Paul Kelly’s Christmas Train, is far broader in scope than the usual Christmas standards collections, ranging from new original rock songs to an Irish folk ballad set on Christmas morning. It also reflects the experience of Christmas in the southern hemisphere in songs such as Swing Around the Sun andan Australian carol from the ’40s, Three Drovers.
In 2022 and 2023 he released new compilation albums on themes from Time to Rivers and Rain, Drinking and Poetry, including new tunes among some of his best-loved material.
On Fever Longing Still – the title is from a line in a Shakespearean sonnet – Kelly returns to the subject of many of his greatest songs, from Love Never Runs on Time and Careless to Wintercoat, When I First Met Your Ma, If I Could Start Today Again and Firewood and Candles.
Love in all its shades is the theme for an album which introduces new Kelly treasures like Houndstooth Dress and All Those Smiling Faces to that bulging songbook of songs about love. The songs arrive in various ways. Houndstooth Dress is so fresh you hear Kelly teaching the band the song. Taught By Experts is a brilliant new version of a song he has been trying to perfect for 30 years.
Variety has long been a key to Kelly’s recording career, which includes albums ranging from bluegrass and country (Smoke and Foggy Highway) to funk and soul (Professor Ratbaggy, The Merri Soul Sessions).
He set Shakespeare sonnets to music in 2014’s Seven Sonnets & a Song. This was followed by an album with guitarist Charlie Owen of songs they had performed at funerals (Death’s Dateless Night), and an album with musicians from broad-ranging backgrounds interpreting bird-inspired poems (Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds).
In 2020 Kelly released an album in collaboration with jazz pianist Paul Grabowsky, Please Leave Your Light On, and a stand-alone single, Sleep, Australia, Sleep, about Australia’s shameful response to environmental realities. In 2021 he released Every Step of the Way, a song inspired by footballer Eddie Betts and his battle with racism. In 2023 he released Khawaja, a song about Australian cricketer Usman Khawaja.
Kelly’s willingness to experiment and work with collaborators including his long-time band has played an important role in keeping that creative fire flaming.
His 2017 set Life is Fine became his first No 1 album and that year Kelly won two ARIA Awards, for best male artist and best adult contemporary album. He returned to the awards in 2018, dedicating a poem to Kasey Chambers as he inducted her into the ARIA Hall of Fame, an honour Kelly received in 1997. He has received 17 ARIA awards for recording and five APRA awards for songwriting.
The natural world flowed through Kelly’s 2018 album Nature, which featured new Kelly songs as well as his musical settings for poems by Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas.
His body of work includes live albums (see the CD/DVD recording of an Australian tour with Neil Finn, Goin’ Your Way, andthe 8-CD box set A-Z Recordings, revisiting his songs with acoustic guitar, harmonica and voice). To this add thefilm soundtracks, co-writes (he co-wrote the land rights anthem Treaty with Yothu Yindi), production work and decades of touring, playing the kind of shows fans never forget. And he found time to write perhaps the finest and most unflinching autobiography ever written by an Australian musician, also titled How to Make Gravy.
Kelly’s Order of Australia in 2017 acknowledged distinguished service to the performing arts and the promotion of the national identity through his contributions as singer, songwriter and musician.
In 1997, he released best-of compilation Songs from the South. In 2019, Songs from the South 1985-2019 brought the story up to date. But Kelly’s mission is to keep creating, keep exploring, keep finding new ways to move the fingers, the music, the heart, the mind.
“Feeling dry is the normal state for a songwriter,” Kelly says of the creative process. “Most days I don’t have a song or anywhere near a song. You do anything you can to break old habits, jamming with the band to find a different riff, playing a different instrument, putting the guitar in a different tuning.
“Often I will say, ‘I have no ideas today’ so I learn a song instead. In lockdown I spent three weeks learning how to play Stardust by Hoagy Carmichael. I don’t know if it leads anywhere but at least now I can play and sing Stardust.
“You have to keep turning up and keep trying, stay open. And write things down when they come into your head or otherwise they go out of your head.”" - www.paulkelly.com.au/bio/
www.mixcloud.com/FromAlbionAndBeyond/from-albion-and-beyond-241109
Scots S/S, composer & superb fiddler Kate Young, & bespoke guests, open each half of this week's program from her "Umbelliferæ" ; Northumbrian small pipes piper/fiddler/composer Kathryn Tickell, & top drawer guests, follow on from her 40th anniversary revisit to her debut album (On Kielder Side) wi...
