slides and other Irish tunes spanning over three centuries and resonant with wider Celtic echoes, Cape Breton in particular. The pieces, each of which is described in detailed tune notes based on research at the Traditional Music Archive in Dublin, are organised in an array of 24 tune sets that must assure Luke’s perpetual place in the pantheon of great box players.


Consistent agility, fluidity and dynamic sense characterise his playing of a button accordion with the keyboard tuned to A/Bb allowing him to present the traditional tunes in conventional keys but using intricate fingering patterns that provide a refreshing originality. His playing forms the foreground of a beautifully balanced soundscape with, equally consistently, excellent and empathetic accompaniment from, in the main, Seamie O’Dowd (guitars – steel strung, 12 string and resonator; harmonica and fiddle), Junior Davey (bodhrán) Dennis Cahill (guitar and cittern) and Rick Foot (double bass). The recording has a very live feel and is of such a clear quality as to suggest the musicians are in the room playing for you!


This album is a truly great achievement by this ever imaginative, interesting and versatile player imbued with an innate sense of Irish traditional music and the wider Gaelic tradition but open to contemporary ways of reinterpretation and arrangement. Personally, I’ve a modest interest in the button accordion as an instrument but found myself in no way tired or distracted at relentless exposure to so much instrumental tune music. The intricate melodic detail and rhythmic intensity of the music is both magnetic and compelling; indeed I challenge anyone to listen to it and sit still!


Kevin T Ward NIMROD WORKMAN


Mother Jones’ Will Musical Traditions MTCD512


Now that Rounder has turned its back on producing their North-American Traditions CDs, it is left to Britain’s own Musical Traditions label to take up the baton. And they do so in style. How should you approach a CD such as this? What should you expect from a toothless 83-year-old singer who, long before, had been forced out of his 42-year career as a coal miner by Black Lung disease? (By the way, Workman lived until the age of 99). Well, the spittle and consonant pronunciation is occasionally as one might expect, but what I wasn’t expecting is the sheer energy, life and joie de vivre of his performances.


Putting many singers half his age to shame, Workman encompasses a huge range of songs and styles of performance. Traditional ballads of great antiquity (an astonishing version of Biler And The Boar, and a wonderful version of Matty Groves called Lord Daniel, which I love because Matty wins the fight at the end!), coal-mining songs which he wrote (Coal-Black Mining Blues) and sentimental material (The Drunkard’s Lone Child) – so there’s something here for everyone. All are sung with energy, control, humour and love and give a real insight into the overall repertoire of a Kentucky singer.


Sponsored by BIrnam CD


As ever, Musical Traditions have included a number of extra tracks as well as the material originally issued on the Rounder CD, with their usual extensive and impressive documentation.


Paul Burgess


SID KIPPER Gutless


Leader Records LEKCD2126


witty liner notes: “Sid has been somewhat put out over the past decade or so that the BBC’s flagship folk programme has consistently ignored him and his recordings”. He claims he has never once appeared on Mike Harding’s programme as a solo artist.


Can this really be true? If so, it is a sad indictment of Smooth Operations. Surely, one slot from the admittedly excellent familiar names that seem to crop up on that programme whenever I tune in (e.g. Waterson: Carthy, Kate Rusby, Bellowhead, Martin Simpson, June Tabor, John Tams, etc) could be sacrificed, for us to hear Sid solo?


It would probably do wonders for his CD sales. And would probably help those members of Generation Y who never saw The Kipper Family perform, realise just what they had missed in that duo: because Sid solo still has the magic (even if one misses the brilliant patter and truly touching harmonies of “father and son”).


THE KIPPER FAMILY Two Faced


Dambuster Records DAMCD024


If I am to be totally frank, I am not sure that Two Faced quite recaptures that great chemistry between Chris and Dick. You see, when you read that the album contains “unreleased gems”, and you know that the duo has long been ancient history, you have to ask yourself just WHY the tracks were “unreleased”! After all, they did release 6 albums in their years together.


And when you hear the album, you understand why many of the tracks never made any final cut. True, they all contain a level of wit, but most alas have not enough to sustain a 3 minute funny SONG.


Ah, but one thinks: surely, it is worth hearing these songs just to hear father and son’s plaintive harmonies again? Well, yes, up to a point Lord Copper! The problem is though, that the sound quality on the earlier tracks on Two Faced just does not do the duo justice.


But the sound quality is just dandy by the time we get to the last song on the CD: and it is by-far-and-away the best cut on the album. Do You Know Ken Peel? It really delivers in spades.


Both these CDs arrived in the same post. And in order not to find two separate reviews overlapping, I figure it makes sense to review both albums together. So here goes.


There was a time around the mid-late 1980s, when I would decide to go to a festival simply because The Kipper Family were on the bill. Gosh, they were a good act. They’d regularly have us all in fits. And then, in the early 90s, they were no more: Sid (the son, played by Chris Sugden) went solo, and Henry the father (played by Dick Nudds) disappeared from my radar altogether.


And it is fair to say that Chris Sugden in his bleaker moments must often think that “Sid Kipper solo” has also almost disappeared from public view too. Indeed, the penultimate song in Gutless is a pointed reference to the fact that he claims he cannot get any air time on Britain’s premier radio folk show. He says in his


However, whilst I have some serious reservations about the joint album, Sid’s new solo album is a much more successful affair. Oh for sure, not all the songs succeed (indeed more miss the mark than hit it), but the sound quality is pucka, and the gorgeously unhinged liner notes are a hoot.


The standout song is All Things Dark And Dangerous. I quote from his notes: “This hymn by Wesley Charles is all that now remains of the Pessimist Methodists, a short-lived religious sect, who believed that all was for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds.”


It strikes me that someone with a cast of mind that can come up with something like that, is a national treasure, and should be able to make national radio at least once in ten years (when the Usual Suspects often seem to hog the airwaves!)


Dai Woosnam The Living Tradition - Page 51


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