Kate Green – A Dark Carnival
Self-Released – 2021
It’s been a long 14 years since South Yorkshire’s Kate Green’s first and last release, her focus during that time largely being a frontline job in mental health. She has, however, finally found time to revisit the studio for this excellent cocktail of traditional and contemporary material, including five of her own songs.
It starts with the traditional, percussive mandola-driven arrangement of Lady Diamond, a ballad from the North East, the story of the king who kills his daughter’s low-born lover and sends her his heart, Green’s reading is inspired by and dedicated to the late Sheffield singer Hugh Waller. Then comes the chain gang rhythm of Memphis Minnie’s much-covered folk-blues classic When The Levee Breaks about the Mississippi River Flood of 1927, Jed Grimes on Weissenborn slide gathering power as it heads towards a final nod to the Led Zeppelin version.
The first of her own songs come with the swaying samba rhythms and vocal swoops of Renegades (Of Love And Rage). Featuring Patrick Walker on a striking jazzy guitar solo, it’s a tribute to Extinction Rebellion, addressing the exploitation of the natural world and the political and social inequalities that drive it.
It’s back to the traditional canon for a further two well-familiar choices; a strummed sway through the arrangement of Robert Burns’ Banks and Braes and a sturdy, slow march near eight-minute fiddle and mandolin arrangement of Bows Of London, a song about violence against women, following Martin Carthy’s version.
Underpinned by Paul Smith’s drums and with vague traces of Steeleye Span, the fingerpicked Ferodo Bridges is a recollection of her childhood in 60s Greenock in the days when it was a shipbuilding centre. The title references the Derbyshire brake pads company that brokered a deal with British Rail to advertise their name on railway bridges; driving under them was a welcome signpost that she was on her way home.
The second cover is a sparse take on Lal Waterson’s dirge-styled lullaby Fine Horseman, Walker laying down the forceful guitar patterns, followed by the self-penned Dennyesque with a pinch of blues and scat Maddy’s Leaving, a song about empowerment, self-belief and walking away from a dysfunctional relationship. The originals are completed with, first, the organ-backed, slow blues waltz balladeering Mi Amigo, a song written to mark the loss of ten American crewing a B17 in 1944 that crashed in Endcliffe Park, Sheffield, with the young pilot of the song steering the plane away from a row of houses on the fatal approach. The second is, for the most part, accompanied by just the drone of Michael Doonan’s uillean pipes, Reclaim The Light, a return to eco themes and a call to action (“defy the might of the privileged and the shallow/Reclaim the light from the heart of the dark”) that gathers in intensity towards the end and fade.
Of the remaining two numbers, the first, sung unaccompanied, is Peter Bellamy’s setting of Rudyard Kipling’s poem about East Sussex, Cuckoo Song and the other, closing the album with its ringing strummed acoustic guitar, mandolin, piano and a steady marching beat arrangement of the Caribbean sea shanty Shallow Brown, a rousing crowd singalong friendly conclusion to a very welcome long-awaited return to take her place among this country’s finest folk singers.
A Dark Carnival is out now and be ordered via: https://kategreenmusic.com/
Kate also has some live dates lined up for early next year: https://kategreenmusic.com/live