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sometimes appeared to be on a one-woman campaign to sprinkle the stardust of Northumberland’s rich heritage of music, people, tradition and countryside on an unsuspecting rest of the planet, and an unstoppable force of nature in informing, sharing and popularising the Northumbrian pipes, an instrument rarely seen far beyond the North East until Kathryn’s arrival.


And look at all her awards! A Queen’s Medal for Music, no less. BBC Folk Awards Musician of the Year in 2005 and 2013 and special commissions all over the place. All this and her immeasurable contribution to the future of the music as a constant inspi- ration to new generations of young musi- cians with her tutorial work and various roles as Artistic Director of Folkworks, founder and director of the young ensem- ble Folkestra and the many projects she ini- tiated at Gateshead’s Sage Theatre.


B


ut this… this Side thing is some- thing else. There are moments when they are on stage when the disparate worlds these four outstanding musicians usually inhabit collide in such a natural and glori- ous fashion you wonder that nobody’s done it before.


Plenty have tried before, of course. And there is no shortage of musicians play- ing in the folk genre who’ve had a proper, serious classical training. There’s even been the odd outburst of sheer brilliance such as the time Frankie Gavin took De Dannan into a thrillingly fiery treatment of Handel’s The Arrival of The Queen Of Sheba (In Gal- way), with steam coming out of his ears at the end of it.


And yet, the suspicion always persists that when such an amalgamation occurs, it invariably feels unnatural, forced or laboured. None of that applies here. There’s a moment on stage when Tickell and Louisa Tuck play a fiddle-cello duet of such fervent harmony it feels like the instruments must somehow be locked together in some strange, spooky kind of sorcery.


Amy Thatcher’s flowing accordeon,


Ruth Wall’s intricate harp, Jimi Hendrix on the cello and the versatile Tickell herself – they play without fear or compromise, they clash and unite and they are spellbinding.


They do a cracking live show, too, of course. Theirs is not a music merely for intense study. Amy Thatcher suddenly leaps to her feet and starts clogging, while their set is peppered with familiar strains of something borrowed, something blue, a snatch of Early One Morning here, a Henry Purcell minuet there among some gorgeous original material and even – when they feel up to it – a song. Tickell has rarely sung in public before and Amy Thatcher virtually never, apart from choirs, but there they are duetting, with yearning tenderness, on the surprisingly catchy Queen Of Pleasure. It’s adapted by Tickell from The Match, an ostensibly romantic poem by Charles Alger- non Swinburne, a rebellious alcoholic Lon- doner with an interest in sadism – perhaps shedding light on the line ‘if you were queen of pleasure and I was king of pain’ – who spent his summers in Northumberland and offended polite society with his impo- lite innuendo and decadent ways.


“We did talk about including a song but Amy had never sung on stage and I’d only done a little bit, it’s not where I feel


most at home,” says Kathryn. “But we thought we’d give it a shot. We both felt it was important to do something nobody had ever done before so we had to find a new song rather than one experienced singers had done rather well. We couldn’t imagine doing something June Tabor had sung.”


“And the one way we could be sure was to find a poem and put a tune to it our- selves. So I started looking through poets with a North Eastern connection and found these Wilfrid Gibson poems and all sorts of other stuff and then I found that. I was toodling around on the piano and that one seemed to get somewhere so we thought we’d have a go.”


There was still an element of panic after Kathryn had written the cello part and presented it to Louisa, whose instant reac- tion was to say it was the same cello part she’d played in Downton Abbey. They think she was joking.


“I was still a bit dubious so I played it to my dad who sings and is extremely honest, verging on the critical, and he really responded to it. Some of the singers I like best are the ones who aren’t the best singers in the world but there is something really honest about them, and hopefully there is something honest about the way we do that.”


They are a warm act on stage, too, with plenty of anecdotes and banter. Kathryn tells a long but very funny story about the genesis of their tune The Mon- day Men. She wrote it in honour of a group who meet religiously on Sundays in a pub in Wark on Tyne to discuss what good deeds they will be performing the next day and called the tune The Monday Club. The artwork for the Kathryn Tickell & The Side album was just going to press when some- one pointed out that The Monday Club was also the name of a right-wing pressure group of such nasty extremity that even the Tories couldn’t stomach them and kicked them out. Kathryn was straight on the phone to the printers yelling – you fondly imagine – “stop the presses!”


Thinking on her feet she told them to change the title on the sleeve to The Mon- day Men. Nothing untoward about that, is there? Is there? Well, not at all. Apart from the fact that the Monday Men is a euphemism for perverts who go round nicking womens underwear from clothes lines in back gardens… Which, as Kathryn points out, is marginally preferable to peo- ple thinking her tune is dedicated to a bunch of right-wing bigots.


W


e meet at Heathrow Air- port. The Side roll off the plane from Luxembourg full of beans after a suc- cessful tour which has also


taken in Germany, including a sell-out con- cert at Berliner Philharmoniker, one of the world’s most prestigious classical concert halls. “Amy and I were looking round say- ing ‘Ooh this is nice’ and there’s Louisa and Ruth going ‘This is the Berliner Philhar- moniker…’”


Observed curiously by an assortment of travellers, they carefully prop a sizeable infantry of instruments around them and – taking special care with Louisa’s rare 18th Century Italian cello by Jacobus Cordanus – they arrange themselves in a corner and pitch into coffee explaining their tale.


T


hey laugh at the suggestion The Side had been a carefully designed concept. Having com- pleted the wondrous Northum- brian Voices stage and CD pro- ject with her father Mike using songs, tunes, narrative and old recordings to hon- our the culture, history and characters of the area, Kathryn was ready for a new chal- lenge. She’d also just come out of four years as Artistic Director at Folkworks and was keen to get her teeth back into a fresh musical challenge as a release from the constraints of administrative duties.


But she didn’t envisage anything quite as grand as The Side. And she didn’t imag- ine the logistics would be so awkward either. A Scottish harpist who lives in Corn- wall? The much-sought lead cellist with the Royal Northern Sinfonia in great demand by the classical world? An accordeonist and clog dancer busy with her various other outlets, including the Monster Ceilidh Band and The Shee? That was never going to work, was it?


On a practical level it couldn’t have been any more difficult to put a cohesive unit together. Yet, both offstage and on, there’s a rare chemistry between them, binding them together, egging each other on musically and conversationally. They make a great team these four… Louisa the Charismatic, Ruth the Bubbly, Amy the Calm and Kathryn the Great.


It’s not ideal, especially for Ruth down there in Cornwall, practising from sound files and rehearsing via iPhone, but they make it work.


“It’s such a treat when we get together,” says Kathryn. “If I’d put a band together to be something easy to work with, it wouldn’t have been this band. We’re all doing other things and it’s a nightmare finding time to get together, and in the past I might have chosen people who made it easier. But now I’m older and have children and I don’t want to compromise on the music. If it means we don’t do as much, then so be it. But we do get together it’s wonderful.”


Louisa Tuck appears to agree. A dedi- cated, serious and highly committed classi- cal musician she may be, but Louisa has open ears and an open mind, and she was always surprising her colleagues with the broad range of her musical interests. While the others make dark allusions to a past interest in, er, Jason Donovan, she happily tells of playing at a Ben Folds concert and singing along with every note (“Since I was a teen - ager, I always thought he was amazing”).


She certainly seems to have embraced the more informal environments Tickell tends to occupy, treating audiences to ‘cello spins’ when she’s really in the zone.


Moving to the North East in 2007 she became aware of Kathryn Tickell – impossi- ble for any musician in that neck of the words not to have heard of her, frankly – but regarded what she played as some sort of alien entity and never dreamed there would be any common ground for them to con- template working together. Her first reaction was that Kathryn and her colleagues made it up as they went along and she was quite amazed to discover how structured it is.


“I did projects with Kathryn and really enjoyed them but I couldn’t see how I could possibly integrate what I do into it.” She turns to Kathryn. “But when we did that


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