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Rating: ★★★

View album and artist details

Album and Artist Details

Artist/band:

Rowan Piggott

Label:

Scribe Records

Jan/Feb/2019

Piggott was the musical engine behind a number of folk releases over the past year or so – from Sussex singers Rosie Hodgson and Georgia Lewis (both of whom guest here) and his own Songhive compilation of songs about bees. So it was crying out for the Irish fiddler to finally deliver this, his debut solo album.

It is a fine collection of songs and tunes rooted in his native County Galway – with a thread of tunes from 92-year-old Paddy Fahey and the influence of his father Charlie's band, Dé Danann – but Piggott now lives in Sussex and is a part of the southern English folk scene, meaning that he's not afraid to branch out beyond the Irish tradition. This is most notable on a collection of lovely Swedish tunes picked up from Värmland to Dalarna on his recent tours. Piggott is joined by guitarist Felix Miller, and the whole album is a nice pulling together of the myriad influences that have so far caught his magpie eye for a story and a tune, including ‘Queen & Country’, a track that also appears on his recent song project, Songhive, and the lovely ‘When All the World was Young’, featuring the poetry of AE Housman and Charles Kingsley.

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