Various Artists – Destination: Fellside Recordings 1976-2018
Fellside Recordings – 29 June 2018
Destination is the third – and final – multi-disc compilation in the trilogy loosely charting the “story of Fellside”. Final because it marks a specific turning point in the 42-year history of the UK’s second biggest independent specialist folk record label. For, after releasing a staggering total of over 600 albums, Fellside’s managing directors Paul and Linda Adams have (see recent post) taken the decision to “move into semi-retirement and transfer some of the work”, at the same time stressing that the business is neither closing down nor being sold. It’s not clear what the “much more low-key” continuation of the business will involve, but Destination is to be taken in its literal sense – that of Paul and Linda’s place of arrival, “parked up enjoying the view” as it were, so that they (and we) can survey the road thus travelled and recall the milestones passed along the way. Following in the footsteps of previous sets Landmarks and The Journey Continues, Destination adopts an identical tried-and-tested, award-winning format: three well-filled discs housed in a sturdy jewel-case and enclosing a hefty (in this case 32-page) booklet containing song and performer notes both within and arising from episodes or periods in the Fellside story as recounted by Paul himself.
Fellside Recordings – which in addition to the Fellside folk label imprint encompasses the trad-jazz label Lake – has won nearly 20 industry Awards, and enjoyed a consistently high profile has characterised both the incredibly high professional standard of the company’s recordings and the high level of achievement of its MDs who have run its affairs virtually single-handed since Fellside’s inception in 1976.
Inevitably, there’s not space here to mention, let alone discuss, every one of the set’s 64 tracks! But there are so many points of more than incidental interest …So the plain statistics may, in the end, form the most accurate illustration of the set’s immense value not only to the collector and avid folk fan but also to the general listener. 22 of the tracks – just over a third – have been specially recorded for the set over the past couple of years, whereas 29 are previously unreleased, having been drawn from the label’s exhaustive archives of home-grown (Fellside) studio takes or recordings for which Fellside has acquired the licence. Only 13 of the 64 tracks have been released before in any form: a good number on non-CD format and some on fairly-limited-distribution labels such as Traditional Sound Recordings, Brewhouse or 77 Records. To be fair, a small handful of the recordings – mainly those dating from pre-Fellside days – have had to undergo a measure of “audio restoration”, but the results are more than “sufficiently listenable” and in all cases, their historical value outweighs any intrinsic inescapably lo-fi quality. The tracks by Peggy Seeger, A. L. Lloyd, Peter Bellamy, Swarbrick & Carthy and Barry Skinner all fall into this category; the selection by the trio Jolly Jack is arguably the only one to suffer in this regard, which is surprising considering its comparatively late provenance (a 1995 live recording).
Paul’s booklet essay is divided into nine chapters, the middle seven of which categorise the artists included on the set under various convenient headings such as Those Who Went On Ahead, Hitchhikers and Fellow Travellers. The first category, Giving Us A Push To Get Us Started, generously credits the essential contributions of recording artists from Fellside’s early days (Terry Docherty, Geoff Purvis) to the “push” administered by the likes of Roy Harris (here represented by a track from an album he made with Notts Alliance for TSR), Steve Turner (a Stephen Foster song recorded towards the end of his Fellside career) and Jez Lowe (a brand new recording from 2017), supplemented by Brian Peters, Gerry Hallom, Wendy Weatherby and Ian Bruce.
The next category, Those Who Went On Ahead, sadly signifies those who are no longer with us: the roll-call includes Peter Bellamy, Brian Dewhurst, Bobby Eaglesham and Hedy West, and there’s a stirring account of Black Seam from Swan Arcade, whose ranks included the incomparable Dave Brady. The equally incomparable John Wright performs a poignant solo a capella rendition of (an unexpectedly abridged version of) Paul Metsers’ Farewell To The Gold, while the wonderful, much-missed Maggie Boyle is remembered on The Bramble And The Rose, a new recording which recreates – with help from Siān Levy and Su and Linda Adams – a memorable performance given by the trio Grace Notes at Fellside’s Flash Company Festival in 2001. This last-mentioned category inevitably overlaps with entries grouped under Fleeting Glimpses Along The Way (Cyril Tawney – represented by a traditional song recorded for, but not issued on, the 1992 Voices anthology – and Lou Killen).
There’s further overlap on the Diversions category, with a track by the magisterial Johnny Collins (the uncharacteristic Matt Hyland, where he accompanied himself very respectably on guitar) and a traditional song powerfully performed by the late Vin Garbutt – this being Boulavogue, taken from The First Folk Review Record on Folksound, to which Fellside have acquired the rights… (now the two Folk Review records would make an attractive reissue package!). The Diversions category also contains welcome obscurities by Cherrington-Ward and Knotted Chord, and some examples of the Lake Records repertoire including an astonishing “winging-it” rendition of Duke Ellington’s Cottontail by The LAKE Records All-Star Jazz Band (with Paul on drumkit!) and a storming under-two-minute whirlwind in the form of a previously unissued Diz Disley track, while the specially recorded (as opposed to reissued Lake Records CDs are represented by the whole set’s romping cod-hearts-and-flowers finale That’s All There Is, performed with gusto by Jeff Barnhart and Thomas “Spats” Langham (who else?!).
Serial “hitchhikers” in that aptly-named category are the likes of John Kirkpatrick, Maddy Prior – the latter represented by an a capella unissued track from the Voices recording session – and Dave Goulder – here unexpectedly performing (and very well too) the grisly Child ballad Long Lankin. Also unexpectedly contributing a “big ballad” (in this case Barbara Allen) is Hughie Jones. Hughie crops up in the largest category, Fellow Travellers, alongside other longer-term Fellside recording artists including Bram Taylor, Frankie Armstrong, Sara Grey (here with her son Kieron Means), Bob Fox, Rick Kemp and Nancy Kerr & James Fagan. There’s also Pete Morton, a more recent addition to the Fellside roster, while Martyn Wyndham-Read, who recorded seven albums for Fellside in his 25 years with the label, brings us a song about Lakeland champion Alfred Wainwright (an intensely apposite choice for the Cumbria-based Fellside, of course). Fellside’s key contribution as facilitators to the careers of tremendously talented younger artists during recent years – herewith tracks by Ewan McLennan, James Findlay, Elbow Jane, Gren Bartley & Tom Kitching, Greg Russell & Ciaran Algar, The Hut People, Benji Kirkpatrick, the mighty Spiers & Boden (a gloriously “scratchy” morris medley) and the label’s final “acquisitions” Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith.
The final category of artist represented on this collection is The Drivers – in other words, Paul and Linda themselves. A typically self-effacing modesty characterises Paul’s account, and the entirely justifiable inclusion of the items by their ’80s ceilidh outfit Hot Polka and Linda herself, both taken from the “very nearly finished and lain dormant” band album that (judging from this pair of tracks) must surely be a candidate for proper full release. Paul and Linda (capably augmented by their daughter Susan and Bob Hallard) also turn in a strong, affectionate performance of Only Remembered.
All multi-artist compilations run the risk of being seen as a chance to release imperfect offcuts in the guise of a celebration, but none of the three Fellside sets come remotely within that ambit. But then again, neither can the hoary old “the fish John West reject” axiom apply here, when the artistic quality is so consistently good. It’s difficult to speculate, but in most cases, the only reason for the tracks having languished in the Fellside archive could be because they were considered to be untypical of the artist’s usual output, style or repertoire, or else would not have fitted in with their then-current album releases. Otherwise, they represented isolated (sometimes opportunist) session takes, all definitely within the hindsight-embracing “glad to have in the vaults” category. Clippings from the cutting-room floor several of these tracks may be in nature, but I suspect the broom-handle will be worth wielding again for a further sweeping-up or three.
My only (small) reservation with Destination is with the booklet, in that it’s not easy to quickly locate the background note for any individual track, since these are not presented in the order they appear on the discs, but instead tucked within the collective paragraphs under each generic grouping of artists as charted during Paul’s companionable, readable and refreshingly anecdotal narrative. It is, above all, a magnificent celebration of the achievements of Fellside Recordings, a marvellous collection of life-affirming music that (together with its predecessor-companion issues) richly deserves a place on your “dip into often” shelves.
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