f24 Piping Into The Beyond
Kathryn Tickell & The Side are taking the Northumbrian pipes (and cello, accordeon and harp) to places they haven’t visited. Colin Irwin enters the lounge. Judith Burrows took the pics.
Anniversary of the death of Percy Aldridge Grainger, the renowned Australian com- poser and arranger, celebrated in particular for his adaptations and popularisation of British folk music. June Tabor was there. The Wilson Family were there. And lots of other people. The ladies and gentlemen of the Royal Northern Sinfonia chamber orchestra for one. Kathryn Tickell, who was curating the event, for another.
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Avidly watching the rehearsal before the event, Kathryn and her fellow musicians were struck by the enthusiasm and commit- ment of the Northern Sinfonia – one in par- ticular. Guitarist Joss Clapp leaned over to Kathryn and said “Have you seen that girl on the cello? She plays that thing like Jimi Hendrix!” Kathryn had noticed. And the germ of an idea that had been fizzing around her head for a while began to form a little more urgently.
The Jimi Hendrix of the cello was Louisa
Tuck, whose musical life had, up to that point, been submerged almost entirely in classical music. Her mother was a profes- sional clarinettist, she went to a specialist music school and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy. What she knew about folk music could have been written on one of Nigel Farage’s brain cells.
She was there with Northern Sinfonia playing Grainger’s classical arrangements and Kathryn was there with Joss Clapp and brother Peter Tickell playing folk versions of the tunes Grainger had adapted. Two very different worlds and never the twain shall meet, it would seem. There was no reason on earth why Louisa Tuck – Jimi Hendrix of the cello or not – would be remotely inter- ested in what Tickell was doing on her Northumbrian pipes and fiddle.
But Louisa Tuck was interested. Very interested. She collared Kathryn afterwards and said “How do you do that? We should play some tunes together. Do you want some white wine?”
As it happened, Kathryn did. And not just the white wine. So they booked a rehearsal room in Gateshead to see what happened.
The results were and are spectacular. Already on board was Amy Thatcher, accordeonist, clog dancer, member of The
here was this little shindig in London a couple of years ago. Some place called the Royal Albert Hall. A Prom concert, as it happens, marking the 50th
Shee and Monster Ceilidh Band, regular Tickell collaborator and proud product of Stockport’s celebrated Fosbrook Folk Educa- tion Trust, where she’d first found her pas- sion for folk music at the age of eight.
As soon as the three of them started playing together they knew they had the makings of something great. The pipes, accordeon and cello combined in exciting fashion, but they needed something more. And that something, they ultimately resolved, was a harp.
“Amy and I both know loads of great harp players in Scotland,” says Kathryn, “but they are all from the folk scene and Amy pointed out that if we got one of our pals in we’d be just another folk band with a classical cellist bolted on to it and we wanted a different element.”
And then Kathryn remembered some work she’d done with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and the sparky young Scottish harpist Ruth Wall. “We’d got on well. I’d written a piece for the NYO and Ruth got in touch and said ‘You know this piece you’ve written for the harp, do you not think it would be better an octave up?’ So we connected well and I looked her up on YouTube and discovered she lived in Cornwall.”
And thus was born Kathryn Tickell & The Side…
We are, of course, familiar with the wonders of Kathryn Tickell’s fiddle and Northumbrian piping which have made her something of a national folk treasure. Hail Kathryn, the teenage inheritor of the legacy of Billy Pigg! Official piper to the Lord Mayor of Newcastle! The guest of choice in the studio with everyone from The Chief- tains, Linda Thompson, Jimmy Nail, Beth Nielson Chapman and four – count ’em, four – Sting albums! Not to mention Kathryn the intrepid musical explorer, end- less fearless expeditions on the dark side under her belt, including collaborations with jazz sax man Andy Sheppard; Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who wrote and dedicated his Kettletoft Inn project to her; pianist Joanna McGregor; and the late Jon Lord, who once did remarkable things on key- boards with Deep Purple and roped her into his Durham Concerto opus performed at Durham Cathedral.
Over the last three decades she’s creat- ed a remarkable volume of work. Concerts all over the world and more than twenty albums, during the course of which she’s
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