Looking Glass

Fay Hield is the first new signing to Topic Records for a decade. Topic is the oldest independent label in the world, torch-bearer of British folk music through dark days and home to stalwarts such as Martin Carthy, June Tabor and Tim van Eyken. Fay Hield is Jon Boden's partner – the mastermind behind Bellowhead, and their fiddle player and singer. So people could be forgiven for expecting something spectacular, and different, from Looking Glass. What Fay Hield delivers is neither; this is an album of mostly traditional songs, delivered fulsomely but without guile by Hield, with restrained fiddle, viola, and concertina accom-paniment. Some she sings unaccompanied. There is a nyckelharpa and some percussion, and one song is a Peter Bellamy setting of a Rudyard Kipling poem about Elizabeth I, but that is as exotic and colourful as it gets.

So much the better. Hield does what she does, and what she does she does exceptionally well. She is a singer who can carry not just a tune but a narrative. ‘Kemp Owen, for example, is a convoluted tale of a transforming curse that twists through 21 verses, but Hield makes the story clear. ‘Little Yellow Roses’ is narrated from the point of view a dying Spanish (or could it be American?) Civil War soldier; its imagery is bright and spare, and Hield makes it immensely moving by doing not too much. And she captures a lunatic jollity on ‘Mad Family, in which the devil releases a deranged family from hell because he can't bear their happiness. Topic has made a wise decision here, because not only is Hield a fine singer who gets the best out of her musicians, but her choice of material is interesting. This is her debut, and I think her voice will grow richer. But this is the work of a mature and assured talent.