Hollowbone

Right at the heart of this startling album comes ‘Nemesis’, a hymn to the Roman goddess of justice and retribution. The words and tune are ascribed to Mesomedes, the favourite musician of the Emperor Hadrian, who ordered the building of the wall that bears his name, a close presence in the lives of Kathryn Tickell and her band, and resonant in these times.

Hollowbone includes ‘Morpeth’, a version of a tune in the oldest manuscript of British pipe music, and ‘Colliers’ one of the oldest mining songs. There is also ‘Darlington’, an anonymous children's rhyme, and ‘Aboot the Bush’, an ancient and strange dialect song. Such repertoire is not surprising; smallpipe and fiddle player Tickell has constantly mined the musical traditions of Northumbria since she released her first album, aged 17, in 1984.

But on ‘Morpeth’, Tickell's Northumbrian smallpipes flutter like a seabird over waves of percussion churning like an ominous sea. On ‘Cockle Bridge’, Tickell coaxes long notes from her pipes as if as she were the lead guitarist in a rock band. In the opener ‘O-U-T Spells Out’, counting and skipping games are whispered over fast percussion and synth breaks. There are references here to hagstones (rocks with naturally occurring holes) and hollowbones, used in shamanistic rites to allow the ancestors to speak to the present. And that is exactly what Kathryn Tickell & The Darkening are doing here.