The Yorkshire moors, wrote the novelist Emily Bronté, were a place to walk where your own nature would lead you. If only Emily could had lived in the age of Spotify and earbuds, she could have had the ideal soundtrack as she hiked away from the shadowy region, whose unsustaining vastness waxes drear. That soundtrack being Cold Blows The Rain, the first album which prolific vocalist and freeform avant rocker Bridget Hayden has released with this trio, The Apparitions.
It’s difficult to escape the shadowy regions of the Calder Valley, as the prevailing climate – as the album title implies – is in a mostly minor mode. Fretting drizzle and moky fogs. About a half hour’s drive south west of the Bronte village of Haworth, just on the other side of the untamed moor that Emily took as the setting for her novel Wuthering Heights, lies Todmorden. It’s here in West Yorkshire that Hayden, and the Todfellows’ Hall where these songs were recorded in 2022, and the Basin Rock label that’s now releasing them, are based. Tod-morden: death and murder appear to be woven into the ancient cloth of its very name. And while there isn’t exactly a murder ballad among this batch of eight English and Irish traditional songs, there are plenty of wounded souls suffering terrible loss, and restless spirits whose graves were not dug deep enough.
The Apparitions are well named. The arrangements, sparse but never parched, are an ethereal blend of Hayden’s banjo, cello and synth; Sam McLoughlin’s harmonium and Dan Bridgewood-Hill’s violin. On tunes like “When I Was In My Prime” and “Factory Girl”, plucked banjo stalks across vibrating strings and squeezed air, like a skeleton tiptoeing through a field of windblown grass.
The opening “Lovely On the Water”, a song originally collected by composer Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1908, sets the tone for the rest. It’s a lament for a pair of young lovers ripped apart. A last, tearful embrace before he must set sail for a distant war. The incomplete song’s last lines describe the collective mourning on Tower Hill of bereaved mothers, wives and lovers. The Apparitions take the song at a steady, funereal pace, adding dignity to devastation. Next comes “Blackwater Side”, a tale told from the woman’s perspective of a love betrayed. It’s a familiar entry in the English folk canon, but where earlier versions by everyone from Anne Briggs to Sandy Denny and Oysterband tend to enhance its rhythmic perkiness, here Hayden drapes the song in a shroud of despond.
On “She Moved Through The Fayre”, a lyric mostly written by a pair of Irish folk collectors just over 100 years back, Hayden’s gentle vocal swoops and glides. It’s a milder nod to a signature technique familiar from singers like Maddy Prior. Mostly, though, Hayden’s plays her vocal straight and unmannered. In this way she comes across as an inheritor of Shirley Collins’ mantle: a vessel pouring these old songs out in a neutral English timbre.
Another key figure is Margaret Barry, the Irish singer who recorded “The Factory Girl” three times in the 1950s with key folk figures Peter Kennedy, Ewan MacColl and Bill Leader. Hayden and the Apparitions’ version of the same song is quietly heart-rending. A wealthy man falls in love with a goddess he sees trudging off to work in a factory. It’s an enigmatic ballad where myth collides with the harsh realities of the industrial revolution, although the trio abandon the narrative in mid-lyric, just as he is trying to tempt her to leave her place of work. She gets to exercise her blue notes in “Red Rocking Chair”, a traditional tune channelled from Dock Boggs in the 1920s via the New Lost City Ramblers in the post-war folk revival. This track includes some satisfyingly deep-throated tones dredged from the bottom end of McLoughlin’s harmonium.
Hayden has a long, peerless pedigree in the broad realm of British underground experimental music. She cut her teeth in the Leeds avant rock/improv/free folk collective Vibracathedral Orchestra, and as a sometime collaborator with US outsiders Sunburned Hand Of The Man and British alternative veterans The Telescopes. These are all groups whose MO involves jumping off a rock face and embracing the free fall, however sticky the end may be. Since her 2011 solo album An Indifferent Ocean, she has become adept in sculpting intimate drone/noise artefacts, notched and pitted like potsherds pulled from the Yorkshire earth. Her more recent contributions to Folklore Tapes (including several collaborations featuring Apparitions member Sam McLoughlin) have refined this approach. In the past few years Hayden and McLoughlin have teamed up with Richard Chamberlain in Schisms. Their ultra-lo-fi fuzzball psychedelic improv can be exhilarating, but exists on a very different planet (or at least in a far muggier climate) than the exquisite acoustic snowglobe of Cold Blows The Rain.
By their nature, folk songs are like ghosts. They keep insisting on being sung, again and again, returning to haunt the singers who voice them, and we who listen. They seem to know us, adapting to our own times and our current ways of hearing. It’s only when they remain bogged down in customs and traditions that they seem smaller, under control, exorcised of their power. Perhaps it’s this that makes “The Unquiet Grave” such a perfect end note to this album. Appearing in the Child Ballads published in 1860, “The Unquiet Grave” is one of those archetypal works of folk art whose central mythology can be traced back to ancient Greek, Roman and Norse folklore. A dead woman’s spirit returns to tell her abandoned lover to pipe down after a year of wailing. Otherwise she can’t rest in peace. And he can’t join her in death, as he wishes, because then their hearts would wither away. Perversely, this mordant lyric is as much about living the earthly life to the full, even as it focuses on the minutiae of grief and loss. Scores of artists have recorded this song since the Second World War, yet by suppressing all sense of melodrama and focusing on the pure emotion of the situation, Hayden has pulled off one of the greatest renditions of them all.
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