Celtic Connections
Shirley Collins
City Halls
THREE STARS
Shirley Collins’ return to singing after nearly forty years is as delightful as it was unexpected. It’s a delight that came at a price here in the form of a Collins-less first half that was more to be endured than savoured and a backing band that sounded rather more comfortable accompanying live morris dance soloist Glen Redman and the front porch step dancers on the back-projected film.
Leaving aside the notion of having to kiss a lot of frogs to find the princess – or, at eighty-one, perhaps she’s more of a duchess – Collins herself was quietly magnificent. She may have lost her singing voice to dysphonia in the late 1970s but she clearly never stopped living with and loving the English and Appalachian song traditions.
In a voice that’s now as full of character as it once was light, even blithe, she tells a song beautifully, not just imparting the narrative with clarity but also imbuing the characters with warmth and fellow feeling. Women who ran off to sea and paid with their lives, masons who didn’t get paid for their work and the contrary old buffer hero of Old Johnny Buckle all materialised in a dimension beyond words and music, even allowing for the complementary images on the screen above her and despite some iffy intonation alongside her.
She tells a good anecdote, too, prefacing Pretty Polly, which she and Alan Lomax collected on their 1959 American adventure, by remembering the outhouses they encountered, if they were lucky, in deepest Arkansas. National treasure is now an overused term but it’s a description that Collins long ago earned and wears effortlessly now.
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