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Kathryn Tickell was seventeen when her debut album, On Kielder Side, first hit the shelves. In a small but important way, it shook up the world of traditional music. Although she had obviously been putting the work in for years – winning prestigious contests at the age of thirteen – Tickell seemed to have arrived fully-formed as a master of the Northumbrian smallpipes, and her work would go on to change the profile and standing of the instrument in ways we are still seeing today. Smallpipes players are having something of a moment, with artists like Brìghde Chaimbeul and Mairearad Green releasing critically acclaimed and successful albums which, in Chaimbeul’s case, have transcended traditional audiences and found a niche in the realm of the avant-garde. Much of the groundwork for this expansion was put in, unknowingly, by Tickell.
She was also at the forefront of a kind of musical movement which still exists today but which is difficult to pin down with a name: it’s the sort of music that reacts to and reflects upon a particular landscape and has its literary analogue in the works of Scottish nature writer Nan Shepherd. She was one of the first folk musicians to attempt to create an organic or holistic musical world which celebrated the beauty of a landscape, its folklore and its wildlife while also highlighting concerns relating to the environment and land use.
Forty years exactly after that debut, it seems that Tickell’s career has completed some sort of cycle. She has chosen to return to the banks and shores of Lake Kielder and the sweeping expanses of Kielder Forest for a new album that draws direct inspiration from her earliest work. Of course, revisiting old work is not a new concept: from Glenn Gould’s two seminal (and very different) recordings of The Goldberg Variations to Taylor Swift’s one-upping of her former record label, via Car Seat Headrest’s divisive retooling of Twin Fantasy, it’s been happening across all forms of music for a long time. But Tickell chooses a slightly different, more ambiguous route. Rather than a direct re-recording of her debut, Return to Kielderside is a kind of revisiting in a wider sense of the term: an artistic, physical, psychic repositioning of the musician against the landscape that first inspired her.
So there are updates of old songs, but there are also new ones. This is important, because it shows how music and our relationship with tradition change over time, and also because it shows a landscape in a state of (natural or unnatural) flux. Perhaps the most pertinent and emotive symbol of this flux, in Kielder at least, was the sycamore tree at Sycamore Gap. Once one of the most iconic and photogenic scenes in the region, it was felled in an act of criminal damage in 2023, causing a national outcry. One of Tickell’s new pieces, inspired by and named after Sycamore Gap, lies at the heart of Return to Kielderside. A meditative drone augments a mournful, almost funerary pipe melody, while a field recording of a curlew – itself a symbol of grief and ill omen – adds to the composition’s ruminative air. It all serves to show place – and specific regional topography – is still an important part of regional pride and identity.
Amongst the re-recordings of older tracks is the opener, Joan’s Jig/Cut the File, a delightfully laid-back dance which showcases the flit and fluidity of Tickell’s playing. A B Hornpipe/Billy Pigg’s Hornpipe – the first part written by Tickell for Alan Brown of the Monkseaton Morris Men, the second composed by ‘The Border Minstrel’ and smallpipes champion Billy Pigg – is another brisk set with a distinct sense of movement. Pigg is also represented in the album’s closing track, the slow air Border Spirit, which was recorded in a single take and features some of Tickell’s most emotive playing, with Julian Sutton’s melodeon carefully constructing a backdrop full of space and openness. The capacity for change in traditional music is brought into full view on two very different versions of an old tune called Kielder Castle, either side of a new version of Johnny Cope. The first, Kielder Castle, is slow, lonesome and wild; the second is forceful and blustery, powered by Ian Stephenson’s energetic guitar.
Yearning Law is a newly-commissioned piece which, in barely three minutes, manages to capture the beauty and solitude of the Northumbrian hills. The pipe melody is almost vocal in its expressiveness and emotional range. Greystead Hornpipe/Remember Me pairs a new hornpipe with an older piece: this kind of pairing provides a valuable glimpse into Tickell’s working practice over time, and demonstrates her innate ability to seamlessly splice her own compositions with the wider body of work that represents traditional music as a whole. Essentially, with tunes like this, we are witnessing the growth and natural change of tradition in real time, and its safeguarding for the future.
So much of folk music’s past is built on the work of individuals, real people and real characters whose stories would be lost if not for artists like Tickell. On Roman Wall Rambo, she commemorates the accordion player Henry Robson, a friend of her uncle’s. Robson was a border farmer whose music was influenced by Scottish dance tunes, and Tickell’s flighty, skittering homage is fittingly inspired by those same dance bands. On Dick Moscrop’s Fiddle/The Steel, she remembers an old friend and fellow musician. On the first part, the atmosphere is more ruminative and more melancholy, though the joy of happy memories percolates through it. By the end, the tune becomes rambunctious and celebratory. As well as her work on pipes, Tickell is a gifted fiddle player with the ability to move with ease between her chosen instruments, and on this pair of tunes, she demonstrates the range of her fiddle playing, moving from careful phrasing to wild abandon.
Tickell’s work has always embodied the generosity of spirit that defines folk music and that enables ideas to filter down through generations and across borders. It is an artform built on sharing, on community, and she has a natural grasp of this. Return to Kielderside is full of tunes given freely and tunes accepted gratefully. One such tune is KC Waltz, which was written for Tickell and her daughter Casey by Arlo and Jem Quilley. It is paired with Rede River Girls, a slip jig which Tickell wrote for Arlo and Jem’s younger sisters Romy and Tuuli. Again, it’s multigenerational cross-pollination in action in the shape of two tender and beautifully played tunes.
Return to Kielderside is, among other things, a document of what has happened between that first Kathryn Tickell release and the present day: the numerous solo albums, the OBE, the honorary degrees, the collaborations with Sting, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and Alan Parsons. It is also a catalogue of minuscule changes, all of which, when taken together, represent an artist who is the same but subtly different. It’s like a long-exposure photograph of an important and highly impressive career in constant evolution.
Return to Kielderside (1st November 2024) Resilient Records
Order via Bandcamp (Digital/CD): https://kathryntickell.bandcamp.com/album/return-to-kielderside
Upcoming Live Dates
Please book tickets early.
Kathryn Tickell & Friends
November 29th, 2024 – Live Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne
November 30th, 2024 – Live Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne
Kathryn Tickell & Amy Thatcher
December 6th, 2024 – Wadsworth Community Centre, Hebden Bridge (SOLD OUT)
December 7th, 2024 – The Coniston Institute (SOLD OUT)
More details and Ticket Links: https://www.kathryntickell.com/live-dates
