Sense of the Place

Folk clubs and artists were hit hard by the pandemic, and Stonehaven, twice voted the BBC Alba Folk Club of the Year, launched its Hands UP for Trad to provide financial relief for performers, while online concerts raised yet more. This album is another prong in that campaign of community support, a ten-track set featuring as many performers with songs that come from the heritage and lore of the area.

They include Kris Drever, Iona Fyfe, Jenny Sturgeon, Bob Knight, Paul McKenna as well as a house band of Jen Austin, Emma Smith, Mhairi Hall, Aaron Jones and Mike Vass. Fyfe opens the set with a retelling of the elaborate revenge of Lady Finella, a tenth-century noblewoman, upon the king who killed her son. Kris Drever chooses the painter Joan Eardley for his song ‘Catterline’, named for the Aberdeenshire village where she made many of her works. Mike Blackburn’s ‘Boat Memories’ is a paean to a now-abandoned fishing boat, and the traditional industries of the north-east coast are eulogised by Irene Watt’s ‘Calloused Hands’, about her grandmother and the other fisherwomen of Aberdeenshire. These are rooted in the locale, in deep history, while alive with the same kind of forces that fuel all our lives and stories.