People’s piper

CONCERTS are coming thick and fast and there's a new album due to be released, but North-East folk superstar Kathryn Tickell admits that her life is in chaos at the moment so much so that she's unable to highlight her 13th release, Instrumental.

"The problem is that I've just moved house and I can't connect to the internet and the website so, as I'm not particularly business-minded, I forget to tell people the things I'm meant to tell them about and tell them all sort of useless details they don't need to know,"

she jokes.

The album hits the shops on May 28 and comes a month before her most important concert to date, a coproduction with The Sage Gateshead on June 23.

Before then, just in the North-East, she's sold out a Hexham Gathering performance on May 26 and at Richmond on June 14 before her travels bring her back to Wetherby Festival on October 25.

"Moving house was kind of bad planning and I'm in absolute chaos, I can't find anything. In fact I had a concert with Peter, my brother, the morning after I moved. So I very carefully put the pipes and fiddle where I knew they'd be when I got up. But all I could find to wear was wellies, I couldn't find any shoes or anything at first," she laughs.

To discover that always-youthful Tickell is 40 this year comes as a surprise and she confesses it has come as a shock to her too.

"Oh no, don't start on, I'm trying to ignore that. There's a big birthday this year which is a bit shocking really because for so long I was always the youngest musician playing folk music and always the youngest in my band.

Then, all of sudden, things have changed and I'm the oldest one in the band and turning 40, which doesn't feel right at all," she says.

And the day of her 40th is a straightforward band rehearsal just before a tour date and Tickell reckons there'll be no time to mark the occasion with anything special.

"I'm trying to ignore it, quiet, stop going on about it," she jokes as I suggest a special song or purchase to celebrate the landmark.

So we move on to the importance of her description as "Northumbrian piper". "It's very important, obviously I'm playing the instrument of the region and a lot of the repertoire is Northumbrian tunes. I also do a lot of my own compositions and quite a lot of those are influenced by the landscape and the people and places up here as well. If you come to one of my concerts you hear a lot of familiar places mentioned," she replies.

She's lived in Coquetdale, Northumberland, for the past ten years and the Simonside Hills have had a direct influence on her music.

"The way the mist comes down the hills and rolls to the valley is an inspiration, but I've just moved to Bellingam, North Tynedale, so we'll see what happens there," Tickell adds. Discussing Instrumental, her 13th album, she says: "I like 13, it's been my lucky number for some time, so I'll just stay there for a while. The thing that takes the time, normally, is building up the repertoire for a new album but over the last 18 months I've been kind of bursting with music. I've been a little bit prolific and the album that's coming out on May 28 is my third one in 18 months which is probably taking things a little too far. So I'm feeling a bit sorry for the audience because I'm bombarding them with albums."

The three recent releases are all different. The latest is herself, Peter, Julian Sutton on melodeon and Ian Stephenson on guitar and a product of her touring band line-up; Strange But True, just before Christmas, included collaborations with musicians like jazz saxophonist Andy Sheppard and in February last year came a duet with Scottish harpist and singer Corinna Hewitt, called The Sky Didn't Fall.

"I think I need to take a little holiday now. I love the idea of taking a nice holiday in the sun but so far it doesn't seem to be something that I'm very good at. I think I just get too excited by new ideas and the idea of collaborating with people, it really kind of fires me up. I'd find it very difficult to keep doing the same repertoire for a long time, although there are some tunes I've played in concert for the past 20 years," says Tickell who adds that the passion of playing folk tunes she first learned at the age of nine is nowhere near being burned out.

How does the award-winning musician respond to being called a superstar of folk. "I've been doing this for a very long time, yeah, I just do what I do and so far people seem to have liked it, which is great," says the globe-trotting performer who reveals that she's keen to visit South America at some point.

"The great thing about folk music is that everywhere you go there is some it'll be very different to our own music in the North-East. It's a great thing to go somewhere in France, Uganda or Japan and show them this is the instrument of where I come from. It's very personal and I think people react to that," she says, although Tickell claims she never sees herself as an ambassador for the North-East.

On the concert at The Sage, which will feature Peter, her inspirational father, Mike, and Last Orders - BBC Young Folk Awards 2007 winners - the musician is particularly proud that her own youth ensemble, Folkestra, will be appearing.

She's been artistic director of the project for the past six years and has attracted young players from all over the North. "They are just a wonderful standard and something you couldn't have conceived of even ten years ago.

Just to get players of that age so good and they really do stand up to professional bands and they love it. There's a real sense of excitement when they play. They really come up with the goods."

So is she a hard taskmaster? "Oh I'm terrible," she says bursting into laughter.

"If somebody walked into one of the Folkestra rehearsals they'd be saying who is that awful woman shouting at those poor children?'. But, actually if she saw the musicians they're not actually daunted by me. They just say oh, she's just off again'. The thing is I do expect an awful lot from them but that's only because I know they can do it. If they weren't so good I wouldn't dream of expecting them to play at the standard of a top professional band. And they don't let me down.

"There's room for loads of Kathryn Tickells in the North-East, absolutely.

This music is strong and the more the merrier."

As for herself, in spite of TV exposure and growing interest in her, Tickell says: "To be honest, I'm just happy doing my concerts and albums and I'm not in it to try and get anything out of it for me, apart from the music."

Although, like many other musicians, she admits she doesn't listen to her own albums at all after weeks of intensive recording sessions.

"By the time an album comes out I feel I've done my bit. If I could just get a CD and stick it in a brown paper bag that would be fine by me," Tickell jokes.

* Instrumental by The Kathryn Tickett Band is releaseed by Park Records on May 28.

* Kathryn Tickell's Northumbria is on Saturday, June 23, at The Sage Gateshead.

Box Office: 0191-443-4661 For more information go to www.kathryntickell.com or www.thesagegateshead.org