Return to Kielderside

When she was 16 Kathryn Tickell borrowed a tape recorder and spent a weekend in her parents’ kitchen with friends playing a bunch of traditional tunes and so made her first album, On Kielder Side. That was in 1984. Four decades later the doyen of the Northumbrian smallpipes has revisited it, recording some of the tunes again as well as some new ones. At 16 she played the opener ‘Joan’s Jig’ with great gusto and velocity. Now she takes it more calmly. Mature, she reveals a richness in the tune, as she does in the final track, Billy Pigg’s beautiful slow air, ‘Border Spirit’. Tickell loves a hornpipe, a reel and a waltz, and has written some crackers that honour musical friends and relatives, capturing their characters. Among the new tunes, too, is ‘Sycamore Gap’, a lament for the famous tree next to Hadrian’s Wall that was illegally felled in 2023. This is heartrending, the drone a continual moan behind a melody that sounds like someone sobbing.