Blood history, music and song, exquisitely, from the Gàidhealtachd, by two of the region’s finest daughters; Mairearad Green & Rachel Newton.

Release Date: 4th October 2024

Label: Shadowside Records

Format: CD / Vinyl / Digital

STANDING ABOVE THE PACK

With no shortage of harp, accordion and pipes albums released this year, it takes quite a bit to stand above the pack. This has much more than quite a bit, and may well be this year’s lodestone for this sort of music. Rachel Newton we know well around here, such the prolific tide of releases this way coming, year by year, whether solo, in duo format or as part of the celebrated Furrow Collective and of the Spell Songs project(s). A prodigious exponent of the clarsach, the Celtic harp, which she plays in both acoustic and electric mode, she is also pretty handy on the viola.

Green, whose name may be familiar from King Creosote’s performances and recordings, plays accordion and bagpipes, and has a clutch of her own albums too. Green is also a painter, and provided the artwork across the detailed packaging and contents. The remarkable thing is that Newton and Green are cousins, and this project takes it’s basis from their shared family history.

Anna Bhàn

Anna Bhàn was their great great grandmother, and, during the highland clearances, gained quite a name for herself. This was the successful women-led Coigach resistance of 1852, whereby a group of plucky womenfolk saw off the assaults of the landowner’s men on their lands and livelihood. Look it up on wiki; it’s all there. And with no little irony that the landowner, too, was a woman, the Marchioness of Stafford, it all makes for quite an uplifting story, which is what the pair here set out to present, in music and song. The timing is set to coincide with the recent unveiling of a commemorative sculpture, and a launch performance of the suite, at Coigach Community Hall, Achiltibuie, on the evening of the day of release.

It all starts with the titular song, named after the family matriarch, which is a delicate lilt of a melody, starting with the sound of plucked strings, ahead the gentle breeze of accordion, to which viola then locks alongside. Piano chords add to the build, before the cousins chime in with their light and airy vocals. It is all quite charming, the lyrics evoking the simplicity of life on the croft. Hard work but honest, without any aggrandising of that status : “she builds and she ties, she digs and she lifts“.

This leads into Achnahaird, the homestead itself, which, over Newton’s harp and found sound, is an accompanied conversation, around the kitchen table, involving their Uncle Ali. The background, as other instrumentation seeps in, may be more successful than the conversation, however much it adds context. I suspect many may skip this on repeat play, although, as I write, it does sneak out tendrils that may make the opposite point. File under whether you like talkie bits, I guess.

1852

1852 starts with a sotto voce 1,2,3,4, before a reprise of the piano, harp, viola and accordion ensemble play, which works so well. A doleful and mournful tune, it is quite affecting, not least as the pair pipe up with their simple harmonies. It more than makes up with any annoyance, if dissipating, of the track before. In fact, I’m now hooked on this melody.

The sleeve notes explain how the story unfolded, the story of how, when the warrants for compulsory seizure were presented, so they were summarily burnt, with the bearers of the bad tidings stripped of their clothes and their boat dumped into a potato pit.

THE BURNING OF THE WRITS

The Burning Of The Writs is another deceptively gentle tune, if with a drone lurking forebodingly in the background. Pipes then echo the harp melody, Scottish small pipes, that gentler relative of the highland pipes, bellows driven, with a sound akin to those of Northumbria, if a little warmer even than they. Speeding up midway, the mood shifts from maudlin to mardy, and what the village womenfolk did with that. It is fair to see that it is with these two tracks, one and then the other, that really nail this album as a keeper. Pipes remain at the forefront for Not Today, Not Tomorrow. The song, in Gaelic, is the answer to when the crofters might be prepared to leave. Largely drone, it is hypnotic and defiant, both at once.

Lady Stafford perhaps offers the other side of the story, “allowing” the absent landlord the benefit of any doubt as to her knowledge of her tacksman’s deeds, the sub-lettee of her lands and the perpetrator of the intended evictions. Maybe, as a sombre piano chords slow and sonorously. Viola then picks up a spectral air, as the harp dances a ghostly twosome, with spectral voices seeping in as it processes languorously, the sound of gradual realisation unfolding. Of course, the acts up on the north-west coast could not go unaddressed, with punishment duly administered. Ceit Bheag refers to one such, the fate of Katie Campbell, forced off the estate, and having to live down on the inhospitable lochside shore. An appropriate instrumental dirge, again it is principally pipes, underset with piano.

THE WICK FISHERMAN

The Wick Fishermen is a livelier piece, accordion back and supplying the characteristic mellowness the bellows give to the instrument. Speeding still further into hornpipe territory, it denotes how attempts were made to involve the fishing fleet into the impasse, if ultimately unsuccessfully. Regardless of whether it functions or not as narrative, it is a pleasing change of flavour, and shows off Green’s nimble finger work. A reminder that all the material has been all so far written by the two women, the penultimate track, Am Banais, is not, being a Gaelic song dated from the time of the events. Hence, possibly, sung and known by Anna, Ceit and the others.

It all ends with Tha Ainn An Seo (or We Are Here) as, convincingly, they are, the family, still there, able to retain the harsh environment they called home, and where Newton/Green forbears reside to this day. Pipes set up a defiant call of solidarity, over a drone and some siren-esque background vocals; the souls of the past watching over the present.

CLEAR & BALANCED

With the hand of Andy Bell at the production desk, as you would imagine, the sound is clear and balanced, adding further to his credential as a prime proponent of adding value to his portfolio of customers. This is both a good record of music and of history, instilling the need to want or read more around the subject. (Like, why the Wick fishermen? Was this the herring fleet as it travailed the coastline, up, down and around? Postcard, please, on that one.) But, good as in enjoyable, rather than just good as in worthy, and for that the two players can and should be commended. And justly proud of their heritage.

Check out Achnahaird below:

Mairearad Green: Website / Facebook / X (formerly Twitter) / Instagram

Rachel Newton: Website / Facebook / X (formerly Twitter) / Instagram

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