Jackie Oates: Gracious Wings album review — original compositions mingle with pop reworkings

Jackie Oates is one of the reliable voices of English folk music, but her albums — with the exception of the glorious Hyperboreans — have not always matched her ability. Gracious Wings is a mixed album: songs from theatre projects mingle shyly with traditional ballads, the odd original composition, and a couple of reworkings of modern pop songs.

Some of the preoccupations of the record come from Oates’s current studies for a degree in Music Psychotherapy, which saw her shadowing a music psychotherapist in a hospice. The therapist, Tom Crook, compared his role to that of the harpy No-Name in Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass — later renamed Gracious Wings by the book’s heroine. The harpy might be a cousin of the central figure of “La Llorona”, the vengeful weeping ghost of Mexican folklore. Originally, the song was written for a dramatic performance by Amy Mason. On this version Oates is joined by co-writer Megan Henwood on guitar and vocals, while John Parker’s double bass howls eerily.

The album opens with a jaunty traditional song, “When I Was a Fair Maid”, a tale of a girl who disguises herself in a “blue coat” and enlists as a sailor; Oates’s reading rattles along with producer Richard Evans on mandolin. Things are still at sea for “The Ship in Distress”, a tale of nautical cannibalism narrowly averted by the appearance of a rescue vessel. Oates’s Oxfordshire neighbour John Spiers adds melodeon and Anglo concertina as silvery as a moonlit night on “Lament to the Moon”, a lover’s farewell to a drowned fisherman. Spiers also sings joint lead for “Iruten Ari Nuzu (I Am Making Wool)”, a Basque lace-makers’ worksong.

An interstitial instrumental “Roobarb & Custard” (not, sadly, the theme from the 1970s children’s cartoon, though named after the show) bubbles with accordion from Mike Cosgrove.

The modern cover versions are both interesting. A reading of “On and On” by Longpigs flattens out the rock-star sneer in Crispin Hunt’s original vocal into plainer sincerity. And on closing track “Time Time Time” there is the imagined spectre: a duet with the space left by the absence of Tom Waits’s gravelly voice, which is filled by double bass. The verses are filled with a Waitsian cavalcade of bohemian characters. “It’s time, time, time that you love,” choruses Oates, joined by The Imagined Village bandmate Simon Emmerson and by her music psychotherapist mentor, Tom Crook. “And it’s time, time, time . . .”

★★★☆☆

‘Gracious Wings’ is released by Needle Pin