Hailing from the Lake District, Wild Feral Fierce is Clarke’s solo debut album following both her own EP and one with The Reivers. A traditional singer of rich and sturdy voice, she’s joined here by Salthouse fiddler Anna Hughes, accordionist Amy Thatcher, John Pope on double bass, co-producer Pete Ord on guitars and, sculpting the soundscapes, Jacob Stoney playing piano and synths with special guest Kathryn Tickell on Northumbrian pipes.
Mostly comprised of traditional tunes, from Britain, Europe and Scandinavia, it opens with ‘The Spectral Stag’, Hughes giving fiery fiddle on the gruesome Rhine legend of a baron who’s punished by a ghostly stag and hunter for his trespass on nature, serving a message about taking care of the environment. Better known, ‘John Barleycorn’ gets a moody arrangement with a distant, muted guitar behind her earthy voice, the sound swelling with the arrival of drums and strings.
A shape changer song from Denmark, a story familiar from ‘On Yonder Hill There Sits a Hare’ and ‘The Song Of Hiawatha’, the circling fingerpicked ‘The Maiden Hind’ tells how, ignoring his mother’s words to shoot only deer and doe, a hunter kills a hind only to find it’s actually his sister. Learnt from the singing of Martin Carthy, the sparse and spectral-sounding ‘Bonny Woodhall’ is of Scottish origin (Bonnie Woodha is on the east bank of the North Calder water), telling of a young miner who leaves his sweetheart, Annie, to fight for the King and thinks longingly of her and his home when he’s wounded in battle.
Sung unaccompanied and learnt from Nancy Kerr, ‘Strawberry Town’ is a variant of a traditional murder ballad variously known as ‘Bruton Town’, ‘The Bramble Briar’ and ‘The Jealous Brothers’. That’s followed by another repeated ghostly guitar pattern on ‘Burd Margaret which, taken from the repertoire of Nick Dow, is more familiarly known as ‘The White Rose In The Broom’, another murder ballad in which the rose grows from the dead woman’s mouth and the unfortunate chap who breaks it off gets covered in blood and hung for killing her.
Pushing past seven minutes, the macabre ‘Sir Aage And Lady Elsilil’ is another of Danish provenance, a version of ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’ where our dead protagonist visits his sweetheart begging her to release him from her promise to marry him, here though telling of the vanquished knight who returns spend one last night with her before departing to the afterlife, she dying a week later.
The remaining three numbers are all Clarke originals, the first being the strummed guitar and jittery violin quasi title track ‘Wild Feral & Fierce’, written during winter 2018 about the search for self-acceptance in a world hostile to those who are different. Inspired by Sarah Hall’s ‘Mrs Fox’, a short story of a woman transforming into a fox, it’s a feminist anthemic encouragement that, however painful the transitional stages of life may be, you will eventually emerge liberated.
The other two close up proceedings, ‘North’, a collaboration by herself, Hughes, Pope, Thatcher and Tickell that evokes her Cumbrian birthplace, a brief windswept effects-washed instrumental with the haunting pipes blowing down from the hills, and, again featuring Tickell, appropriately enough, ruminative slow swayer ‘Home’ where she proudly sings of “many a wonder to be found” amid its valleys, walls and waters. Fiercely ferrous folk.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.hollyclarkemusic.com
‘The Spectral Stag’ – official video:
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