Kathryn Tickell, East Neuk Festival review: '

Renowned Northumbrian piper and fiddler Kathryn Tickell’s show packed quite the punch, writes Jim Gilchrist

Kathryn Tickell & The Darkening, Anstruther Town Hall ***

Nizar Rohana, St Ayle Church, Anstruther ****

“Darkening” may be a local term for twilight, but there was little atmospherically Twilight-Zone-ish about renowned Northumbrian piper and fiddler Kathryn Tickell’s quintet. It packed quite a punch – too much so at times, with drums and volume levels threatening to take the edge off the sweetly bubbling tone of her Northumbrian pipes. I could have listened all night to her duetting nimbly with accordionist Amy Thatcher, as well as taking up fiddle to propel the latter’s deftly percussive clog dancing.

Kathryn Tickell and friends (Picture: Georgia Claire)

With new guitarist Tim Bloomer, drummer Joe Truswell and Stef Conner on support vocals, lyre and synth, this was a weighty if infectiously boisterous folk-rock outfit.

Songs included a version of the Collier’s Rant sung in earthy “Pitmatic” miners’ dialect, and Jimmy Nail’s heartfelt homeland paean My Northumbria, while instrumentally, as well as brisk jigs and hornpipes, there was High Way to Hermitage, inspired by Mary, Queen of Scots’ fateful journey, although an upbeat treatment did rather fail to convey that Border stronghold’s grim reputation.

Tickell’s pipe lament for the felled Hadrian’s Wall sycamore hit the spot, introduced by that quintessentially moorland call of the curlew.

If Tickell’s Northumbrian pipes carried tradition, Palestinian oud player Nizar Rohana’s instrument seemed freighted with history. The taut, microtonal melancholy emanating from his Arabic lute turned one’s thoughts, inevitably, to the only too present afflictions of his region.

Rohana, however, was upbeat and intent on playing both his own compositions, some from his current album, Safa – “Purity” – and others by recent pillars of Arabic music, as he picked urgent torrents of notes, sometimes broken by sudden silences, or pensive, melismatic deliberations, all suggesting music of profound pedigree.