Our final interview to come from this year’s Cambridge Folk Festival is with Kathryn Tickell, OBE. As a fierce and leading proponent of the Northumbrian smallpipes, with a staggering solo and collaborative discography, we were excited to dig a little deeper into the backstory behind her most recent release, Hollowbone. Taking to Stage 2 late Saturday afternoon, Tickell’s set with The Darkening was energetic, enigmatic and hugely enjoyable.
After having being held up earlier in the day by traffic, Tickell kindly took the time to chat before her appearance. Towards the end of our interview, Tickell vented her frustration at traditional music occasionally being deemed ‘backwards-looking’. Surely seeing the synergy of these players in action and hearing this cross-pollination of styles should dispel any such notion.
As well as talking at length together about the conception and priceless multiple meanings of Hollowbone’s O-U-T Spells Out (nominated for best original track at this year’s BBC Folk Awards) we also touched on her collaboration with wunderkind Jacob Collier, singing Fathers, the influence of history and place on her music and her continued work with the Magnetic North East project.
Congratulations on the release of Hollowbone. It’s a bit of a departure from your previous records, you’ve labelled it as ‘dark and scary’…
Well, it’s like reverse marketing really. I guess I was obviously just trying to warn people because a lot of my audience might not go for that sort of thing. So, I wanted them to know that if its solo Northumbrian pipes playing sweet little folk tunes, they’re after, then maybe it wasn’t going to be the band for them. I don’t want to mislead anybody, it’s just a slight government health warning. It’s not that dark and scary, but it’s certainly darker than other things that I’ve done.
What is the symbolism behind the title?
One of the songs, O-U-T Spell Out, it’s one of the lines in there. That’s all taken from children’s rhymes. Counting rhymes, old kid’s skipping and playground games. I really got into them, there’s some incredibly weird stuff. Sometimes when you look at it more, what first looks like nonsense words, after looking them up, I saw there was so many more layers of meaning in them than I’d realised. So ‘Hollowbone’ was a word in that.
Also, it’s really important in shamanism. It’s the channel through which the energy flows, through which the communication comes. I also really like the fact that the oldest musical instruments in the world were made of hollow bones, bird bones. There were lots of little connections that made it feel like the right sort of title for the album.
How did you decide on the line-up for this album?
It kind of just happened because I knew what kind of sound I wanted to make. But I didn’t know whether it was going to be a band or simply an album. At one point I was thinking I’ll just do an album, get loads of people on it and from that, I’ll extract a touring band. Then I did a little mini-rehearsal with Amy Thatcher (vocals/accordion), Kieran Szifris (octave mandolin) and Joe Truswell (drums), who are all the ones that live in Newcastle. It just worked. I always knew I wanted extra percussion as well, so Cormac Byrne was up for it. But I needed it to have this slightly different edge to it, which is where Kate Young (vocals/fiddle) comes in.
On paper it’s like ‘fiddle player and singer from Scotland’, you imagine something quite folkly. But Kate has a real otherworldliness to her. She’s just one of these people you don’t know from one day to the next, “is she going to be in Mexico? Or is she going to pop-up in Peru?” she could be anywhere. She travels around a lot and she’s influenced by different cultures and traditions. But not in a kind of surface way. For example, a couple of years ago Kate was in Bulgaria and had a singing lesson with one of the top singers every day for three months. When she wants to find out about things, she really does! Not that we do any Bulgarian songs. It’s just being able to harness that knowledge and those different ways of singing. She just brings a different feel to the band.
There’s a lot of different styles and genres coming through, at times there’s almost like a hard rock edge. Then there’s also these guttural bass pads, on synth is it?
Yes, and also the accordion. We use the bass end quite a lot. I’d put the band together before I actually realised, “I’ve got a drummer, a percussionist and then no bass or guitar”. It was like “hang on a minute this is quite weird”. It makes it quite difficult to know how you’re going to cover that ground, but then it’s also one of the things that probably helps it to sound different to other bands.
I know you’ve worked indirectly with Richard Dawson. Hollowbone seems to share some similarities with Peasant. There’s this kind of Northern grit applied to quite an ancient setting, with a commentary that seems quite modern really.
I don’t know quite know if we’ll do another album, how I’m going to find the material – because I don’t know how I /we sourced the material for this one really! It just made its self-known. It was always very clear to me what was the right material for this band and what wasn’t. Certainly, for the album. The kids counting games, it started somewhere very innocent and then turned into something that was very far removed from what I thought it was going to be.
I got all the words together, then Kieran, Amy and I were having a rehearsal and then it started with a kind of riffy thing, then I decided we’d just say the words. I said “Amy, just play something… Yes, that’s it!” I just sang something over the top, just on one note really. It snowballed from there and it obviously had the Northern link as well.
Then there’s Nemesis, the Roman one. I really enjoyed exploring that idea of the music of Hadrian’s Wall and it’s all imaginary. It’s a creative response to the people who may have been there 2000 years ago. I just enjoyed the whole concept of it. These people from all over the world wondering around in Northumberland, probably thinking, “what on earth am I doing here?”. What would they have been listening to and what would they have been playing?
I suppose it felt like the wall was the token or the talisman of this band. It’s got so many aspects to it. These ideas of barriers and borders, which are so current yet hark back several hundred years ago. It’s difficult to explain because I have a strong sense of what the band is but I don’t quite know how to put it into words just yet. I know what it feels like.
There was an interview you did with Laura Barton for Notes On A Musical Island, I found it fascinating when you spoke about how music, landscape and place intersect. When talking about composition you mentioned, “you don’t particularly see colours or a topography, it’s more about the atmosphere”.
Obviously, the pipes are incredibly evocative, but how else do you try and capture that atmosphere? Is it just through total immersion? You talked about stumbling across these cup-and-ring marked stones, there seems to be something very elemental about it all.
Again, it’s very hard to put your finger on exactly what that is. But it’s something I’m very drawn to that’s cropped up in other music that I’ve made. I’m still just trying to tap into that but in a slightly different sound world.
It’s funny, I made a playlist for the band when we got together, just things I thought that if we all listened to it might give us some hint of where I was going with the idea. It had a range of different tracks from around the world. It was Kieran who pointed out that the two things that were in common across all the tracks were: firstly, there was a lot of percussion throughout and the other was, even the really fast tune tracks, they all had a sense of longing. Some deep yearning in there as well. I think that’s definitely what I’m drawn to and I think that you can get that across even in the fastest things. It doesn’t have to be a slow air.
With Hareshaw Burn you spoke about how the song’s composition followed the natural course of the river. I was wondering if any of the songs on the album were written in a similar compositional approach? Perhaps Old Stones / Holy Island Jig?
With that, I was just trying to portray the different atmospheres of Holy Island, but sometimes you start off somewhere and the tune decides it’s going to go off somewhere completely different. But then I brought it to this band and they started doing Brazilian rhythms to it and I was like, “hang on a minute, this is meant to be about Lindisfarne in Northumberland!”
I suppose maybe that links up with the meeting of cultures surrounding Hadrian’s Wall. Does that tie in with O-U-T Spells Out where some people saw it as a Brexit commentary?
That was horrific!
What is the story behind that?
It’s not about Brexit at all! All those children’s games are all, “you’re it! Who’s in? Who’s out?”. That was one of the lines in the title that I chose at random. Brexit sprung up so suddenly. When we were putting that song together it was the last thing on our minds. The album was meant to be released on the 29th March and the people who were doing publicity for it spoke up saying, “I don’t think that’s going to be a very good date to do it, with the title track being what it is”. That was a bit of a shocker.
But then I played it to my brother and I was like, “Peter, what do you think? What does this song make you think of?” He listened to it and he said, “well it’s obvious isn’t it? It’s a gay anthem!” I thought, “Brilliant! That’s our get out of jail free card” Now it gets introduced as our gay anthem. But that’s great, I quite like that fact that this thing that was only about kid’s games, comes out sounding like this scary incantation that some people are seeing it as a gay anthem, some see it as about Brexit, some see it as an ironic look at Brexit. We just quite enjoy it. I like the rhythm of it.
It’s funny, such an innocent song on the surface has such sinister undertones.
That’s why we added it in the, “round and round, we all fall down” section because it was sounding a little more threatening. Also, we were really looking at the Rubber Bandits, if you’ve heard of them? They do a lot of comedy stuff but also very clever material. The last single I caught of theirs was called Sonny and it was about mental health and suicide. It had an influence on that track somehow. I’m not sure exactly in what way that manifested itself, but it definitely did. So that was another kind of interpretation. Saying, “Right, I’m out of here”. There’s lots of possible meanings or none.
It also features the song Darlington. When Folk Radio last caught up with you, we were talking about The Magnetic North East project. I was wondering how that’s come on since then? That was taken from the Three Rivers Anthology, right?
I was absolutely delighted that we had a part to play in getting that book out there because it’s really a fantastic body of North East work. Going from the oldest Border Ballads to Sting’s songs, then including lots of different poems. There’s something there for any different taste, I think. Some quite challenging things in there as well. But that little poem, I’m from North of the River Tyne and in the North East if you like Newcastle, you don’t like Sunderland, and vice versa. So, the thought of me singing a song about Darlington seemed a bit strange. But there’s something about that poem that caught my attention. Because again it’s so inscrutable. There’s a darkness to it. It starts off, “when I was a little girl…” and you think it’s going to be one thing. Then halfway through it goes somewhere completely weird and you’re thinking, “what on earth was this about?” So, these little themes started coming through, there’s a few birds and a lot of weirdness on the record.
Barton spoke also about there being an identifiable ‘Northumbrian sound’, I was wondering if you had any thoughts about that?
I guess there’s an easy comparison to make with the Unthanks because we’ve all grown up with the same songs and tunes. Me more with the tunes, but my Dad sings and their Dad sings. Me, Rachel and Becky all suffer from singing Dads who indoctrinate us with these songs. We’re very grateful to them because we’ve nicked most of their material! There’s that pretty obvious connection. Then there’s so much other stuff coming out of the North East as well.
But it’s important for you to support this sense of community?
Yeah, there’s lots to be done. Anything I think that can help – ‘professionalise’ is a really horrible world, it doesn’t sound right – promote what we’re doing and other artists are putting out. To help raise the profile and change people’s preconceptions of it. Especially preconceptions of the Northumberland pipes. There is a certain view of it as being ‘backwards-looking’ in the tourism and the business communities and even arts funding. In all of those things, if you’re looking at traditional music, people think, “ahh that’s looking back – we need to be moving forward” and I feel really passionately that that’s just such a blinkered view and that the tradition is a ‘living thing’. It’s moving forward and it’s really vital and current.
Lastly, I heard you pop up on the opening track on Jacob Collier’s new album Djesse Vol. 2. You’ve collaborated with countless artists – Sting, Penguin Café Orchestra – how did this differ?
Well, it was such a weird thing because I didn’t think I’d heard of him. In my old band the cellist had actually played me some of his videos going, “look at this kid, he’s amazing!” and I hadn’t remembered that was him. Then somebody else mentioned his name and I thought, “Well I’ll do some researching”. I looked him up on Twitter and he had loads of followers and then it said, ‘Jacob Collier follows you!’ I thought, “that’s weird, ok, I’ll follow him back again” and literally a day later he got in touch, saying “I really like your music, do you fancy playing on my album?” and I thought, “Ok…”.
It turns out his Mum had taken him and his sisters to see a concert of mine when he was little, so I think the whole family had learnt to play one of my tunes and had learnt to play it together. It’s so sweet. Then you meet him and it is just unreal. His brain – something’s not ‘gone wrong’ – but his brain is not like other people’s. He is something else. During that session actually, he gave me some bits to play and it was so hard! It was like, “Oh Jacob please!” I remember being in there sweating, it was really tough but it was worth the challenge.
The Darkening Tour Dates
NOV 07, 2019 – UNION CHAPEL, LONDON
NOV 09, 2019 – VICTORIA HALL, SETTLE,
NOV 12, 2019 – ABBEYDALE PICTURE HOUSE, SHEFFIELD
NOV 13, 2019 – WARWICK ARTS CENTRE, COVENTRY
NOV 14, 2019 – LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC MUSIC ROOM, LIVERPOOL
NOV 15, 2019 – NORDEN FARM ARTS CENTRE, MAIDENHEAD
NOV 16, 2019 – WILTSHIRE MUSIC CENTRE, BRADFORD UPON AVON
Ticket Links and more details: https://www.kathryntickell.com/live-dates