29 f “I
t was all very natural and still is,” she says of The Side. “We did this little Purcell thing which we thought would be nice but it was quite short so
we thought we’d put this little tune on the end of it and Louisa was going ‘wow – going from Purcell into this three-two hornpipe, that’s just so cool, that’s so out there. And we thought is it? All we were doing was sticking a tune on the end of it. We’re not trying to play classical music and Louisa and Ruth aren’t trying to play folk music. We’re all just being ourselves.”
Which is exactly why it works so well.
Kathryn warms to the topic. “We didn’t do it to put folk and classical music togeth- er, it was just about the musicians. But when we did that Grainger concert at the Proms, we did folk versions of the Grainger pieces the way we normally do them, but I also took some things like Shepherds Hey. That is a tune I would never normally play, it’s not part of my tradition, it’s not my thing at all. But one of the things I love about Percy Grainger’s arrangement of it is how he could take a tune I would never personally play and don’t like at all and turn it into something absolutely amazing.
“So I took that as a challenge to see if I could take that same piece of music and do something with it. Not to copy Grainger but to do something completely different with it and do it with conviction and be excited by it. It was a challenge. I wrestled with that dratted tune and eventually I found a way into it and the spectre of Percy Grainger looming over me affected the way I wrote. I was consciously trying to widen the har- monic palate and I also notated all the arrangements. It was a different way of
working I hadn’t tried before and it defi- nitely produced some different results which led me into this way of working.”
Another inspirational spectre driving Kathryn as she formulated ideas for The Side was Simon Jeffes, the classically-trained guitarist, composer, arranger and founder of Penguin Café Orchestra. Jeffes led the inventive Orchestra for 24 years until his death from a brain tumour in 1997, achiev- ing immortality with his Music For A Found Harmonium, which has subsequently found its way into the repertoire of a thousand- and-one bands all over Britain and Ireland, even if many of them play it without a clue about its creator and assume it’s traditional.
Among the many guest musicians who worked with the Penguin Café Orchestra was Kathryn Tickell. “I was quite young when I met Simon and we became friends and when he died it was a shock to me. I hadn’t spent that much time with him but he’d written a tune for me and I played on one of his albums and I played at his memo- rial service. And after he died I got to know a little bit more about him so in a way it did- n’t end. It sounds naff but he feels like a guardian angel. I have a picture his partner gave me after he died and it does feel there’s a little something of him coming through with this band because he used dif- ferent instruments and musicians from dif- ferent backgrounds. And while our music is very different, there is something of the same ethos. I feel he is looking benignly down on us.”
Returning the favour of the tune writ-
ten for her, Kathryn has put together a beautiful piece, Penguin Notes, in homage to Simon Jeffes, which appears on the album.
W
ith every folk musician in the populace forming side projects and one-off ven- tures with different musi- cians, you do wonder if
The Side do have a long term future, espe- cially given the logistical problems of geog- raphy and a trillion other commitments. But they are unanimous in the belief that there’s plenty of potential to go a whole lot further with this line-up and while there’s the will, they’ll find a way of over- coming the practical problems.
Kathryn: “The more we work together the more I can see we can do. As we get to know each other better musically we are finding plenty of ideas we want to try out. For example, all of us have an interest in new music and different sounds so we’re quite interested in experimenting with dif- ferent textures to see what will happen. We don’t see any boundaries. We do some hardline traditional stuff exactly the same way as I’d have done it if the group was all made up of folk musicians. There’s no com- promise from any of us. If we’re all happy about the way we’re playing, who cares what genre it is?”
Louisa Tuck has to dash off. Matters concerning the day job. She bids Twiglet an emotional farewell, entrusting the mighty instrument to the care of her fellow band members and we bid adieu to the Jimi Hen- drix of the cello.
“Hendrix…” she muses with a smile.
“Was he any good?” He wasn’t bad…
“Okay,” she says. “Just don’t expect me to go on stage smashing up my cello.”
kathryntickell.com
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