Rachael McShane shows the way and has made another fine map.

Release Date: 28th March 2025

Label: Self-Released

Format: CD / digital

Seven long years

…since the last Rachael and the C’s album, so what has this strings playing singer being doing with herself? The answer is probably best explained by an appreciation she is a Bellowhead lifer, playing mainly cello in the band from near the start, and thus fully part of the current revival years. Be that as it may, it is a joy to see her back with her own band and top billing, alongside her dependable duo of mapmakers, Julian Sutton, on melodeon, and Ian Stephenson, on guitars. Not a cello in sight, mind, she sticking to fiddle and viola here.

If you are expecting transformations and transmutations of the complex styles of the ‘Head, look away now. This record presents the same tradition, but unadorned by other much than love and respect. Oh, and a pretty stellar level of singing and playing, that probably taken as given. The material is drawn largely from trad. arr., with what more contemporary songs sounding as if they too came from there. But rather than slavish simplicity, the love and respect combine to give fresh and sometimes unexpected flourishes around the templates offered. (So, yes, it’s good.)

totally affectation free

The set starts with her own tune, applied to the trad Get Up Jack, which, by merit of Sutton’s mellifluous accompaniment to her fiddle, along with her own light vocal, makes it immediately a joy. Stephenson slots in with some rhythmic picking, and additional scaffolding comes from guest, Andy May, who adds both a bassline and some higher end trills, on piano. A real surprise comes at the chorus, as a veritable who’s who in folk right now chime in with some well-layered backing vocals.

The whos are Janice Burns, Benji Kirkpatrick, Jonathan Proud, Sam Sweeney and Amy Thatcher. You have to be good to rise above such a chorale and McShane passes that test with ease and honours. Her voice is totally affectation free, neither pandering to any the cliches folk sometimes demands. Should comparisons be sought, perhaps it is with a slightly more robust Cara Dillon, were she to hail from the North East of England. But, really, she is her own voice and that is quite enough.

Lady And The Sailor is another bit of old given a bit of new, via her bubbly melody, which imparts an appropriately choppy, maritime feel to the well travelled tale. Given the outcome, it is perhaps a little too buoyant, but it is a glorious version. Followed by The Blacksmith, the venerable tune covered by all from Steeleye Span to Stick In The Wheel, by way of Lisa Knapp and Jon Boden, these all mentioned as examples where the simplicity of the song has been given some sort of tweak. None needed here, McShane playing it straight, singing against the backdrop of Stephenson’s strong and sensitive picking. Toward the close, she brings in some rich deep viola to expand the palette, it being all utterly mesmeric.

Mix of spiky and gleeful

Instrumental territory next, for the tryptych of tunes that follows. Dusty Jigs. It is one of hers, Dancing On A Holly Leaf, to begin, which is the delicious mix of spiky and gleeful that such a title imagines, followed by a pair written by Sutton. Fiddle, melodeon guitar and May’s piano are a good ensemble sound, with High Spirits And Short Attention Spans, as well as being a great name, taking the foursome into a swaying lurch. It’s a short moment, mind, as Sutton suddenly then peels off, for Percy’s Revenge, the rest quick to catch him, a controlled chase to the finish.

Lovely stuff and just the job for setting up something more serious, that being Ed Pickford’s The Workers Song. This is gifted a suitably sonorous backdrop, her voice a bright clarion call. This is actually the second time she has covered this song, it appearing also on Vision And Revision, the Topic records 80th birthday celebration set from 2019. It is hard to see any space between versions, even if recorded 5 years apart and with the same 3 musicians.

A LIGHTER TOUCH

Young Roger Esquire might be familiar more through a male voice, but McShane gives it a lighter touch, with some female harmonies coming from either her double tracked self or, and I’m guessing, from Janice Burns. The piano and melodeon make a receptive bed, with Stephenson adding some neat guitar play between verses. Both Bonny George Campbell and Banks Of Sweet Dundee then share a Scottish heritage, with the first starting mournfully with a fiddle and box intro. McShane lays out the sorry tale with a sort of fascination, that becomes, in itself, quite beguiling. Dundee is, by contrast, a jaunty jig with words, which keeps the changes ringing, even if the instrumentation is little different. Thinking the guitar is especially percussive, I belatedly realise that Stephenson is also contributing occasional double bass across the album

EPITOME OF FOLK

A second instrumental medley is up next, collectively Shivering Stone, led off by Alistair Anderson’s tune of that name. Sounding a close neighbour of The Snows That Melt The Soonest, as Stephenson and Sutton start it off, but as May and McShane add their presence, so that thought lapses. More lively is Sutton’s Jungle Of Cucumbers, no, me neither, which is a lurching and loping sway that bridges into Bingo In Bognor, written by McShane herself., which ducks and dives into a meandering melody. My ears tried to convince me there was percussion sneaking in for this one, down to Stephenson again, multi-tasking on guitar and bass.

The album then sticks with a McShane tune, one she has penned for the fisherman’s song, Windy Old Weather. May’s piano is central to the arrangement, with further deep chunky viola, and the chorale chiming in, full shanty, for the chorus. The McShane voice is as sweet as anywhere across this disc, before the song segues into a short coda of Gilles Le Bigot’s Les Pêcheurs and John Whelan’s Trip To Skye, each tunes to prolong the salt and seaspray momentum.

As a singer and strings player, McShane is first class. With her trio she moves into a premier league, taken still further, I have to admit, by the additional piano of May. Charming, timeless and eternal, is this not the epitome of folk music?

Here’s a favourite, Banks Of Sweet Dundee:

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