St AGNES FOUNTAIN – Christmas Starts With (CFATCD053)

Christmas Starts WithGiven they’ve been doing this for 23 years, it’s about time they got round to another ‘live’ album, the last being in 2002. With the passing of founding member David Hughes last year, they, as recorded here last December, now comprise the trio of Chris While, Julie Matthews and Fairport’s Chris Leslie. The music contained herein is both traditional, self-penned and covers, several drawing on 2021’s Night Of A Million Stars, these kicking off with While’s welcoming ‘Merry Christmas To You’ and also including Matthews’s fiddle-laced sociopolitical commentary ‘Joseph Was A Refugee’, Leslie’s sprightly mandolin jingling ‘Peace On Earth’ and the chugging ‘The Traveller’s Song’ with its mantra like repeated refrain and Seth Lakeman-like echoes, John Jacob Niles’s 1933 Christian folk hymn ‘I Wonder As I Wander’ and performed as a carol and, backed by a simple drone and a fiddle solo near the end, Matthews’ show closer ‘Night Of A Million Stars’.

On the traditional front, you get, other than the refrain and some scat that borrows from Zep’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’, a predominantly instrumental bluesy and harmonica blowing ‘Christmas Is Coming’, a fiddle-driven flurry through Irish three-two instrumental ‘Boules Ex Guirlandes’ and a piano-based treatment of ‘O Holy Night’.

Elsewhere, Leslie on vocals, from Twelve Days of Christmas comes ‘Christmas Time’s A Coming/Jerusalem Ridge’, a bluegrass pairing of two numbers popularised (and in the case of the instrumental, written by) Bill Monroe. Then from 2014’s Christmas Is Not Far Away there’s the While-penned five minute backwoods-tinged folksy title song, and, both by Matthews, the piano and dappled percussive anthemic call of ‘Let There Be Love’ and the bittersweet melancholy of the hymnal piano ballad ‘The Heart Of Christmas Day’.

Touring throughout the month, as the title echoes, they say Christmas starts with St Agnes Fountain. Let the festivities begin.

Mike Davies

Artists’ website: www.stagnesfountain.net

‘Merry Christmas To You’:

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