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An interview with Kathryn Tickell Maireid Sullivan: You have recorded a great many albums, Kathryn. You must have been playing for quite a while. Kathryn Tickell: I’ve been playing the pipes and the fiddle since I was about nine. Before that, I started on the piano and tin whistle when I was six. I made my first album when I was sixteen. It was a bit of a shock. I didn’t really intend to do that recording. M.S. Really? How did that happen? K.T. I had made a cassette before that. I went into the local radio station to play a couple of tunes that were being recording for an upcoming program. So, I recorded a couple of tunes, and they said, “you might as well record a few more while you’re here”. Eventually they said, “do you realize you’ve just recorded over thirty five minutes worth of tunes, can you think of anymore? We can produce a cassette”. So we did it, and they ran off a few copies. I was about fifteen at the time. One of the people there was the same person that organized the first official album. I didn’t know anything about record companies, or the music business, or any of that. M.S. Do you sing also? M.S. What do the Northumbrian pipes sound like? Do they sound anything like uilleann pipes? K.T. Sometimes, yes, they have they’re moments. M.S. Is it hard to get reeds? K.T. No, but they rarely need replacing. I haven’t changed mine in years. They are very different from Scottish and Irish pipes in that respect. The Scottish pipes are mouth blown. The Irish pipes are dryer, so they don’t go out of tune as often. They’re referred to as a “cauld wind pipe” which is spelled in dialect, because you don’t blow into them, air is provided by bellows. The Northumbrian pipes are “cauld wind pipes”. M.S. Did many people play the Northumbrian Pipes? K.T. Yes, there’s quite a lot. I just moved house to a different village in Northumberland, and my next door neighbor, who is eleven years old, is learning the pipes. The daughter of the village grocer is learning the pipes. She’s eleven. There’s a very famous Northumbrian Piper, Joe Hutton, who lived in this valley and died several years ago. I was actually related to him, distantly. He did a lot to get the pipes going in this area. He gave classes and workshops. People would come from a great distance to get lessons. He was the shepherd from Northumberland, a very traditional player. He wasn’t someone with a University education, who learned to play from books. He was someone who grew up with it, like I did. M.S. You mean he was actually out there in the hills as a shepherd playing the pipes? K.T. Yes that’s what he did. My Grandfather was into forestry, and he was a shepherd and a mole catcher. He was one of the last mole catchers in Northumberland, actually. M.S. It seems that Northumbrian Pipers mainly comes from the Northeast corner. Why is that? What’s the origin? K.T. There used to be bagpipes all over the world. They were all over the country. Every county had it's own bagpipes if you went back a few hundred years. For some reason the Irish pipes survived, the Scottish pipes survived, the Northumbrian Pipes survived, and also the Scottish small pipes, which are very similar to the Northumbrian pipes and the Border pipes survived. M.S. So, there are all these different kinds of pipes? K.T. I think there are about five indigenous types of pipes in Britain that are still being played. M.S. What attracted you to this particular instrument? You play the violin and penny whistle as well, right? K.T. I used to play the whistle. It’s mainly the pipes and the fiddle now. M.S. Do you play the fiddle when you tour and record also? K.T. Yes, I do. M.S. Its unusual to find someone who actually has two lead instruments, like you, that you play on a professional level? K.T. I desperately wanted to play the fiddle, it’s the instrument that I would most like to play. I like to play the fiddle with other people. I love to play the pipes with other people also, but there’s something about the pipes. You can play by yourself, and you sense something so old. The pipes are the instrument that is right for me. The are the instrument I feel more of a connection with when I play. Everybody’s got an instrument which is right for them and some people may never find it, because it might be something rare and obscure, like Northumbrian Pipes. I was lucky enough to be in Northumberland, so it was easy for me to find them. I would love to play the piano as well, but I would never be a piano player. With the pipes, it was a total accident that I took them up. They were just lying around. I don’t really remember fully, but I think my Dad had them. There were other instruments around, but I just had a go on them and made awful noises. I thought it was very funny. Then my Dad came in and shouted at me and said “put those things down, and stick to the piano”! which was like showing red to a bull. It was at this point I decided I was going to play them properly. So, it’s strange that although the fiddle was the one that I yearned for, the pipes just came naturally. M.S. How do you feel about playing in front of an audience? K.T. I’ve been doing it for a long time I suppose, so it’s hard to put into words. Sometimes when I’m at home, I’m thinking, I’m pleased to be home. I don’t want to go out and go away then. Then as soon as I get away, and I’m on stage, particularly with the band, when it’s going well, I get the thought in my head, this is what I should be doing! I talk a lot on stage. For the first six years I did a lot of solo gigs, so I had to talk quite a bit. I’m quiet on stage, but not shy. M.S. Do you tell stories about the tunes? K.T. Yes, they’re usually about my Granddad, and uncles and people from the village, and where the tunes came from and where I came from. It’s not like a historical debate. It’s anecdotes. My interest is in how the tune has come down to me. I think it’s important where you get the tunes from and how well you know the person you learnt it from. It’s the value in the tune. There’s a fiddle player that I learnt a lot from, called Willie Taylor, who’s another shepherd. He’s still alive. He’s eighty-two, and I spent New Year’s Eve with him and his cousin, Will, who’s ninety. He plays the mouth organ. With Willie, when I play a tune on stage, the audience is hearing me, but, although I don’t feel that I’m playing exactly like him, they’re also hearing him in my playing. They don’t realize that they are, but they are. M.S. So, then you tell something about him, to give the feeling of him? What would you tell about him? K.T. He’s only got three fingers on his left hand and this is a source of great amusement to him. Everybody’s always amazed when they suddenly notice. One of the stories I like is about the time he and his cousin came to play a concert, and my Dad brought them up. They don’t get out very often, you see. Anyway, they got lost and they drove onto the platform at the railway station instead of down the street. All this is going on with two eighty year olds and my Dad, stranded, in the middle of the platform with the trains, in the car. Dad was in an absolute panic. And all that Willie and Will, the two retired shepherds, could say as they looked out at the station, undaunted by the situation, was, “wow! what a great lamming shed this would make!” My Dad’s on the brink of destruction, and they’re talking about sheep. M.S. Those stories ‘warm people up’ for the music. They get more feeling and appreciate it more? K.T. It’s the feeling that these people are real, that comes across. They’re not idealized shepherds out in the misty blue yonder. They’re real people and they are funny. They might like a drop of whiskey on occasion, or indigestion tablets, and then they can play beautiful music. It’s important to put it in context. It’s really not one person standing up on stage with people that paid money sitting quietly as they listen. That’s not what it’s about. It’s important to play the tunes, and talk about the context. I like it because it’s so linked to this area. My family has been in this area for six hundred years. The tunes are written about people that I know, plus tunes written hundreds of years ago. And the people around me are the descendents of those people from long ago. It all ties in with who I am and where I come from. M.S. What’s the mix in that part of the country in terms of ethnic background? Are there a lot of Danes there? K.T. It’s difficult to say, because the history of Northumberland is a bit confused. This was one of the main centers of Celtic Christianity, the Holy Island, Lindisfarne, established by Ireland’s Saint Aiden long ago. Northumbria was a big country in the time we call the Dark Ages, when our history got lost. It was also the time of the Viking influence. Descendents of Vikings have been farmers in this valley for hundreds of years. They have that same tall blond look. M.S. Do many people care about the history? K.T. People in Northumberland are very concerned with identity. Unfortunately for us, we’re still a part of England, while Scotland now has it’s devolution. We’re far closer to Edinburgh than we are to London. So we always feel like we’re left on the sidelines. The people in the North of England are very concerned that their identity doesn’t get subsumed by London. We are quite isolated and it is the border area where I live where it’s actually been part of Scotland quite a few times. Scotland extends quite a bit further south than where I live, but I’m actually in England. M.S. What do you think will happen? K.T. Well, there is talk of having a regional council and it’s difficult to see what the best thing to do is. We’re very strong with the culture. Especially the history and the poetry and the music as well. M.S. That will really be the way to preserve it, to preserve the identity. K.T. I think that’s why people feel that they have a strong identity up here. There are so many songs that are indigenous to this area. M.S. Are they in the English language? K.T. Not as you would know it, no. There’s a lot of words you wouldn’t understand. The official language is English. It’s just that a lot of old songs are written in dialect and the dialect is very strong. Some of these songs are over six hundred years old, so they’re written in rather archaic language. My Dad sings a few of them, and they go on for a long time. M.S. Does your Father know a lot of them? K.T. They’re difficult to know a lot of, because they are very, very long. He vaguely knows a lot of them, and may need an evening to refresh his memory before deciding to sing one. He always has a couple that he can do all the way through. M.S. Does he ever record? Has he been collected? K.T. Yes, kind of. He’s done a few songs. I’ve recorded an album of him. Not the border ballads because they are too long and it’s difficult to work out what the context could be now, for border ballads. He did a ballad at a local charity concert, and it wasn’t a folk music audience at all, just a local audience, and it was really powerful. It was amazing how it worked. M.S. Has the BBC done anything about it? They seem really interested in that sort of research? K.T. They have programs, every now and then, that investigate the history, to try to find out if these songs are really old, or if they are made up to sound old. They want to know if the ballads are actually true, etc. My Dad really doesn’t get involved with them. He just likes to sing the songs. He was brought up learning the songs outside of pubs when he was too young to go in. At that time people weren’t really taking any notice. It’s only more recently that people have been taking an interest. Dad’s got a voice that can cut across a bar room.
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