It has just begun to rain. So much for yesterday morning's improving five day forecast saying that the rain would not arrive until tonight. If doing the garden were my paid job I'd have to press on, but since I'm doing it for fun and still fending off the lurking cold I thought I'd come inside, and tell you about last night's concert instead. Perhaps by the time I've finished the rain will have passed.
I went to the Colchester Arts Centre to hear Kathryn Tickell on her Northumbrian Voices tour. I eyed this up months ago, when the Arts Centre programme came out, but the Systems Administrator had gone on strike because the seats are so uncomfortable. Then a friend asked if I were interested in going, and I said Yes, but it turned out that the Colchester date fell in half term, and she said she couldn't go. I thought that showed great devotion to one's family, but then discovered she was hoping her husband would take them all on holiday. He didn't, so she put together a party and we went.
Regular readers will know that I like Kathryn Tickell a lot. She is a very fine traditional musician, playing the fiddle and the Northumbrian pipes. She is from rural Northumberland, and her recent CDs and concerts have begun to feature readings from the reminiscences of older family members and friends, whom she has long been recording. The speech recordings started by accident, when she forgot to press the Stop button after recording music sessions, and she found them so interesting that they took on a life of their own as a personal oral history project. Finally she teamed up with a theatre producer, some other musicians and her dad, and made a show out of them. She is accompanied by two fiddlers (who also sing), a guitarist, an accordion player and her father, and they read stories of life in Northumberland interposed with tunes and songs.
That sounds as though it could be cringe-makingly worthy, the sort of thing that could be cooked up by the BBC in patronising mode, or somebody equipped with a grant to make Art in the Community (I have never been a Billy Bragg fan, and loved Ian Hislop's riposte to 'I was a miner' of 'No you're not, you're a Cockney git'). We all enjoyed it very much, and the readings were not embarrassing or cheesy at all, although one of our party did cry at one point. The performers had each chosen their favourite extracts from the entire archive, and these were arranged roughly chronologically and thematically. The first fragments, about old violins, how musicians learn tunes (and the difficulty of getting it right once you've learnt it wrong), and long walks over the hills along the sheep tracks to get to dances, were quite cosy. By degrees we heard more about the hardships of rural life, continuing right into the post war era. The long winters, when the post didn't come for seventeen weeks, or ten, because the roads were blocked by snow. The dangerous search in the snow for lost sheep. We heard how life was changing, how the population of the remote valleys was falling, how people not born to that life didn't want to live anywhere so isolated, which made it difficult for the few locals to marry and stay. We heard how the pubs were not so lively as they were (not solely a northern problem), with the shift towards food and tourism (I felt a twinge of guilt) being partly responsible. We heard how modern technology was changing shepherding, though you did not see and hear so much, like a lamb stuck in a drain, driving around on a quad bike and splitting your working day between two farms, as in the old days when shepherds walked. They told of the loss of the hefted flocks, and the impact on the landscape of reduced grazing, as long rough grass grew and crowded out the flowers.
We learned too of the evolution of traditional music. Kathryn Tickell asked all of the band members what their musical influences were, growing up. In the accordion player's house it was Kate Bush and eighties pop, while the guitarist's father was a devotee of Radio 3 and swing jazz. The parents of one of the fiddlers were into Scottish folk rock group Runrig (and she went on to study classical music at university), while the other had Hank Williams as the soundtrack of her childhood. Kathryn Tickell's parents were both folk musicians, and her father was brought up on Hymns Ancient and Modern. Traditional music in 1970s rural Northumberland didn't exist in a vacuum, and country music was very popular in the Grey Bull in Wark.
Kathryn Tickell herself was more steeped in traditional music than most. Besides absorbing the music from her family, she learnt from the local musicians whose reminiscences formed a large part of the show. These were farmers and shepherds. Oh, and they were all men old enough to be her grandfather, if not great grandfather. I bought the CD of the concert, and in the booklet is a photograph of two elderly fiddlers and a piper who is at least middle aged, plus Kathryn aged approximately eleven, also holding her fiddle and looking very serious. She described how as a teenager she conducted a long-distance friendship with one such player, by then living at some distance away in sheltered accommodation. She would play tunes for him, recording them on a cassette and sending it off when she had a tape full. He did the same thing, recording old tunes for her he thought she might like. Occasionally she managed to get a lift to visit him, and they would spend the afternoon together, playing their fiddles and drinking tea. Before that, as a little girl, her grandfather took her to the Grey Bull on Sunday afternoons, and she sat in the snug with the old boys, playing dominoes.
Nowadays Kathryn Tickell teaches the fiddle at summer schools for young folk musicians. She said that in their playing would be something of herself and her playing, and something of the older musicians that she had learnt from. Although she didn't mention the subject at all, I thought how one of the things that has changed is the ways tradition and culture are passed on. I can't see, amidst the wave of revulsion about Jimmy Savile's activities, formalised child safeguarding, and CRB checks, that a little girl nowadays would have much chance of learning the stories and music of the place she grew up from a bunch of old geezers. It just wouldn't happen.
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