Holly Head

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The legend has been ascribed to several different counties, but the song settles on Lovell Hall in Oxfordshire. And then I’ll fast forward to 2020, the release of Hand Me Down coinciding with the pandemic lockdown, Kate reinterpreting a number of popular songs, including Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake It Off’, Coldplay’s ‘Everglow’ and The Cure’s ‘Friday I’m In Love’, reaching No. I chatted this time last year to fellow Mercury Prize nominee and BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards winner Seth Lakeman, and wondered if you felt those days were as much an apprenticeship for you as him? Think you sign-up to it and then just a matter of choosing picture on your phone etc, upload it then choose 'hotlink for forum', then just paste link in your message.

Pearson in late summer about her LP, Sound of the Morning, and a song on there, ‘Storm to Pass’, with added brass, I suggested to her it was ‘Rusby-esque’. Holyhead ( / ˈ h ə ʊ l i ˈ h ɛ d/, / ˌ h ɒ l i ˈ h ɛ d/; [3] [4] Welsh: Caergybi [kɑːɨrˈɡəbi], " Cybi's fort") is the largest town and a community in the county of Isle of Anglesey, Wales, with a population of 13,659 at the 2011 census. It was in 2008 that she released her first album of reinterpreted traditional Christmas songs, with Sweet Bells followed by four more, the most recent, 2019’s Holly Head, only now receiving a vinyl release.Born into a family of musicians in 1973 in Penistone, in Yorkshire’s West Riding, learning to sing, play guitar, fiddle and piano from a young age, Kate was already playing local folk festivals before a spell as lead vocalist of all-female Celtic folk band The Poozies. B.’, (that’s Bill, Beryl, Belinda and Bob) continues the ongoing story of Barnsley’s own super-hero Big Brave Bill, brass section, diatonic accordion and sleigh bells providing the jaunty backing as Rusby recounts his finding love and raising a Yorkshire Tea-supping family when he himself is rescued after a near nasty husky-drawn sleigh-ride scenario. This one is actually to the tune of a different song that I also love, but I wasn’t that keen on the words, then realised it went with the While Shepherds words, so yey, another has now been invented. Prior to the influence of the fort on the name, the hamlets which came before it were likely known as Llan y Gwyddel ('church/parish of the Irish') and Eglwys y Beddi ('church of the graves').

There’s only three traditional carols proper, the first arriving with ‘Yorkshire Three Ships’, which is, of course, ‘I Saw Three Ships’, here merrily lolloping down the street to a circling guitar pattern as the instrumentation gradually builds, complemented by the cascading notes of a gently lullabying five-minute ‘Bleak Mid-Winter (Yorkshire)’, Christina Russell’s words set to music by Gustav Holst, the number gradually swelling with the arrival of the warming brass, and a fingerpicked minstrel-like ‘While Shepherds Watched’ (her sixth different version).Our aim has always been to keep folking a free service for our visitors, artists, PR agencies and tour promoters. There were the three boys, and I think quite a lot of gigs and venues said to them, ‘We don’t want to book you, because you don’t have a singer. And again, it’s so lovely when you’ve been touring for 30 years, you meet so many other musicians and singers, whether at festivals, or do’s, or award ceremonies or things like that, and mostly you get on great with people. I love how it’s the magic of Christmas through the child’s eyes, ‘cos why on Earth would Father Christmas not be able to bring a hippo? Kate has long since appealed to fans beyond the folk scene and her Yorkshire roots, headlining in the UK and internationally, performing with major music stars across various genres, with a number of TV, radio and film credits to her name, plus her own label, Pure Records, and festival, Underneath the Stars.

As with her fellow festive collections on her Pure Records label, 2008’s Sweet Bells, 2011’s While Mortals Sleep, 2015’s The Frost Is All Over and 2017’s Angels And Men, it is being promoted by a Kate Rusby At Christmas tour with Kate’s regular band and brass quintet. I think he’d been there five minutes when there was this power cut, so we all sat around in the studio, around a candle, singing through the song, him learning it, getting used to it, then the lights came on and he was like, ‘Right, come on, let’s go and do this. So really, it’s our little family thing, and 30 years later, we’re like, ‘Oh, crikey, this is so lovely that we can still be doing it. And it just went like that – every gig I was doing, somebody else would say, ’Do you fancy doing a slot at our folk club?On 23 November 1981, Holyhead was struck by two tornadoes during the record-breaking 1981 United Kingdom tornado outbreak. A large jetty in the harbour received ships from Jamaica and Australia, and their cargoes of alumina were transported on a rope-driven conveyor belt running underneath the town to the plant. She also joined folk group The Equation with Kathryn, invited by Devonian brothers Sean, Sam and Seth Lakeman, a major deal with WEA following before she went her own way, Cara Dillon taking over.

Anyway, she came around to visit, stuck her head in the garage and said, ‘Ooh, you’re getting quite good at that. Yes, we have mutual friends in and around Sheffield, and he’s asked me to do a thing he does at Christmas in Sheffield every year, featuring three or four bands.I did a bit of music, some dancing, and technical – my dad was a sound engineer – so thought, ‘I’ll have a go at that. Half an hour later, somebody from another festival came up and said, ‘Do you fancy playing our festival in a month’s time? I’ve still got numbers for him and his manager, but … It was such a privilege to have a peer into that kind of world though. Well, there’s over 30 different versions of While Shepherds Watched that get sung in the pubs here in South Yorkshire, so I’ve still got a lot to go at!