The Fragile

O’Hooley & Tidow were mightily impress¬ive at the Nowt So Queer as Folk concert at Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, last summer. Belinda O’Hooley used to be the piano player in The Unthanks and plays with a lyrical extravagance. She also sings beautifully, as does Heidi Tidow. There’s a theatricality to their performance and they are forthright in politics (sexual or otherwise), self-deprecatingly funny, unmistakably northern, sensitive and humane. The Fragile is a bold, ambitious work: the 12 songs are all stories of vulnerability, cohering as an exploration of frailty in human relationships, in the natural world, and in the individual self. There is one song imagining the fate of the last polar bear as the snow melts, another, ‘Mein Deern,’ dramatising the final moments of the relationship between a woman and her dying grandmother and, most plaintive of all, ‘Calling Me’, a simple song of longing for a child.

All of which sounds a bit bleak. But there is a distinction between the fragile and the broken, and these are not songs of despair. In their arrangements and in the lovely harmonies of the singing all these frail entities – our relationships with each other, the natural world and ourselves – are powerfully and joyfully, affirmed.