Review | Songlines

Airs and Graces

Rating: ★★★★★

View album and artist details

Album and Artist Details

Artist/band:

June Tabor

Label:

Topic Records

Aug/Sep/2019

Continuing the Topic Treasures series of reissues to celebrate the label's 80th birthday, June Tabor's 1976 solo debut comes with four live bonus tracks from 1971-74 and excellent sleeve notes from Tabor herself and Colin Irwin. These ten Child Ballads and songs were recorded at Sound Techniques in London shortly after her Silly Sisters release with Maddy Prior – that's two classic albums in the space of a few months.

As in the years of folk club performances in the early 1970s, around half of these songs, including a spine-tingling account of Eric Bogle's ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ and Belle Stewart's ‘Queen Among the Heather’, are delivered unaccompanied. Nic Jones and multi-instrumentalist John Gillaspie (who both featured on Silly Sisters) provide the music on ‘Young Waters’, among others, and the settings are distinctive – the weird, pioneering folktronica of the Rocksichord, as well as organ, piano, and Nic Jones' fiddle on ‘The Merchant's Son’. ‘Jealousy, treachery, poverty, prejudice and the futility of war are all here, but so is love rewarded,’ Tabor notes in her introduction to this marvellous reissue. That's as reliable a guide as any, and the extra live tracks, comprising unaccompanied voice and extraordinary song, make it a must-have English folk classic.

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