Echo

Ben Walker is hailed as one of the world's finest acoustic guitarists, for the half dozen brilliant albums he made with Josienne Clarke, and as a busy and popular producer across more than 50 releases. This is his first solo set, and he has drawn on musical friendships with singers such as Bella Hardy, Hazel Askew, Kitty Macfarlane, JinnWoo and Thom Ashworth. As for the songs and tunes, Walker sets originals beside traditional songs and some settings for poems by William Blake (from his collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience), Hilaire Belloc, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth.

Bookended by new tunes with ancient sources – ‘Afon’ and ‘Eostre’ – the first song is Blake's ‘The Echoing Green’, to which Thom Ashworth lends his distinctive tone. Bob Copper used to sing ‘Ha’nacker Mill,' handled here by Yorkshireborn singer Laura Hockenhull, while ‘Rings’ features the voice of George Maynard on a 1960s reel to reel, paired with a synths, strings and consummate guitar setting of a tune from 1780. Ambitious, distinctive and brilliantly achieved. Laura Ward expresses with chilly relish the rage of a wronged woman whose words, left in a suicide note, make up the verses of ‘On Humber Bank’ while Bella Hardy is reliably expressive and affecting on ‘The Island’.