Night Visiting: reviews

Bella Hardy is from Derbyshire’s Peak District, a fine area for folk tradition and community singing. A finalist in the 2004 BBC Young Folk Awards and an ex-member of The Pack, her debut CD so album is a piece of wondrous beauty and inventive incisiveness.

An accomplished fiddler and singer, her hypnotic performance is just mesmerizing. It smacks of young girlish innocence and vocal nievity, mixed with a worldly-wise folk instinct and knowledge. Into the melting pot go Bella’s list of songs, which have been made highly personal be Bella’s special stamp; Three Black Feathers and Alone, Jane? Mark forays into Bella’s original and unusual songwriting, while she shapes and moulds the traditional works such as Dog and Gun, Down in Yon Forest, Molly Vaughan and Bonny Susie Cleland, not as quaint historical objects but as pure art.

Bella leads some dazzling session musicians, including The Askew Sisters, Corrina Hewat on harp and Chris Sherburn on concertina. It’s is Bella’s mum we’ve got to thank for dragging her along to a Folkworks Youth Summer School, where Bella realized there were a lot of pretty cool people playing folk music. The rest, as they say, is history!

Mick Tems

« Return