Shirley Collins: Archangel Hill album review — a folk star finds her voice again

The story of a singer who loses her voice when she sees her husband’s lover in the audience sounds like a folk song. It would no doubt conclude badly for one of the participants: a life of bereft muteness for the singer or grim death for the rival. Perhaps both. Folk music loves an unhappy ending.

Shirley Collins suffered this scenario in real life. The English folk grandee’s marriage to Fairport Convention’s Ashley Hutchings collapsed in the late 1970s after he left her for an actress who took to haunting Collins’s gigs. According to Collins, the sight of this other woman looking back at her triggered a condition called dysphonia. Her famous voice — high and fluting, with grace notes of her Sussex upbringing — seized up. 

Having been a leading member of the 1950s and ’60s folk revival and then British folk-rock’s emergence, Collins’s inability to sing was a cruel blow. She took office jobs and sold her musical equipment. But unlike many folk songs, this tale ends happily: Collins has found her voice again.

Archangel Hill is her third album since her comeback on 2016’s Lodestar. She’s now 87. The inclusion of a live track from 1980 — “Hand and Heart”, a harpsichord number about a fleeting rustic love affair — is a pointed reminder of how she sounded before she was silenced. The incisive soprano of her younger self has been replaced by a lower-toned, slower-paced vocalist, who steps carefully but sure-footedly through a familiar landscape of old songs.

Collins opens with a parting and a death in “Fare Thee Well My Dearest Dear”, which tells of a young woman running away to sea with predictably dismal results. “Lost in a Wood” relates the awful story of two babies perishing. But Collins’s clear diction and calm delivery convey no sense of encroaching mortality. Arrangements are warm and unfussy. The results might lack the spark of her best work, but they carry a sense of wisdom — the unfinished coda to a long life in folk music.

★★★☆☆

‘Archangel Hill’ is released by Domino