Beautifully presented in both aural and physical form (as an illustrated book CD), Christine Collister’s ‘Children of the Sea’ is a beguiling, intoxicating listen and read – a career pinnacle.
As well as releasing several solo albums, Christine Collister has also been a backing vocalist in the Richard Thompson Band, one-half of the much-loved Gregson Collister partnership and a member of Daphne’s Flight; she’s also toured and provided backing vocals for an array of artists. In 2007, she moved back to the Isle of Man, where she was born, and it’s the island’s folklore that provides the fuel for her new album, Children of the Sea, released as a CD hardback illustrated book relating these stories with artwork by Manx artists Nicola Dixon, Amanda Barton and the Artful Dodgers group of oil painters, photographer Izzy Machado-Williams and, pulling it together, the internationally acclaimed David Suff.
The project was sparked by a 2021 Isle of Man Arts Council grant; she proposed to record a CD on songs inspired by Manx folklore, resulting, with the added support of Culture Vannin, an organisation that promotes Manx culture, in the wonderful collection of songs and stories, here telling of birds but also steeped in myths of the sea, about the island. Originally the Isle of Mann, named for Manannan Mac Lir, king of the Otherworld, a parallel land and home to the magical race of Tuatha De Dannan (and yes, that’s where the Irish band took their name from), who adopted the isle as his earthly base, legend has it that he was married to Fand, a Sea Goddess with a mermaid twin sister. Hence, the album’s title, which, of course, also links to the myth of the selkie.
Musically ethereal as befits its inspirations, it opens with what she calls a musical invitation to Lift the Veil and “see what magic lies there”, conjuring a ghostly soundscape. With its pulsing staccato bass notes and melodic refrain, She Was A Wise Woman is based around the story of the witch of Sileau Whallian, an old woman who sells fair winds to sailors or love potions for romantic yearnings “tied up with herbs and string”, the narrative relating how a crew set out to sea ignoring her warnings with “all but a few lay broken at the bottom of the sea”, the two survivors cursing her as a witch and killing her placing her in a spiked barrel and rolling it down a hill into a bog.
Birdsong introduces the repeating keyboard loop and slightly distorted layered vocals of Clever Little Jenny Wren, which tells how, in a contest to decide who would be king of the birds, the wily wren won the crown as queen by furtively hitching a ride on the back of an eagle and, as such, flying the highest. A celebration – and perhaps a warning –of the guile of women.
Of a jazzier hue with a fuller percussive soundscape, A Mermaid’s Song imagines a young fisherman who, having fallen in love with a mermaid, long searched for her as an old man after she was forced to return to her own kind, finally reunited in death and transformation. On equally jazzy inclinations, No Way Back is her interpretation of The Little Moon Fairy, a story from Kathleen Faragher’s By The Fuchsia Tree about Timmy, who works as a Moon Beam Polisher and accidentally falls to earth on the Isle of Man as he rides a beam in an attempt to impress his father, rescuing a little man in green from a tangle of tendrils and eventually finding his way home courtesy of blackbird, Lon Dhoo, and its bright yellow beak. A song about being thankful for friends when you need them most.
Departing from folklore for a song about the island’s natural beauty, a pulsing keyboard traces the circling, slightly spooked Fenella Beach, a cove littered with scallop shells (the bookend photos of them make them seem like feathers) encircled by jagged rocks and overlooked by castle ruins, where she’s been taking dips in the white horses waves of the Irish Sea since 2020 (“in the salt spray I’m born/Over again”).
The Sound of Infinity is a phrase (Sheean ny Feayrid) in William Cashen’s 1912 book Manx Folklore referring to how folk would put their ears to the earth on Dalby mountain to listen to what they believed were sounds from invisible beings from space. This prompts her excursion into atmospheric chilled psychedelia.
The project’s only collaboration, a co-write with long-time musical partner guitarist Michael Fix, featuring strings (or their synth counterparts) Dear Sister is staged as a duet between Fand, sung by Chris While, and her mermaid sister Li Barr, the former lamenting “I no longer feel at home in the waves…I have no recollection and all I do is wrong” while the latter promises “I am here and will stay/Until the day you smile again…till your mind is once more calm”, the song clearly inspired by caring for her dementia-afflicted mother.
As it opened with a welcome, it ends with a farewell, the largely new agey, instrumental with wordless choral vocals Slane Lhiat/Goodbye, a transition back from the magical realm to more earthly lives, assured of the possibility to return, the music rising as she sings the parting words in Gaelic and English translations. Beautifully presented in both aural and physical form, it’s a beguiling, intoxicating listen and read – a career pinnacle.
Children of the Sea (4th October 2024) Fledg’ling Records
Order here: https://fledglingrecords.co.uk/product/christine-collister-children-of-the-sea-fled-3115/