It’s rare for a guest to be booked solely on their YouTube videos but we did just this for Holly Clarke and it was amply justified.
She began with the traditional ‘The Maid of Kilmore’, then ‘John Barleycorn’ as sung by Bert Lloyd, but then sang ‘The Unseen Guide’ which she had set to music from a poem written in her native Coniston to explain how the first Mountain Rescue Team began. In singing a Danish ballad (in English) followed by ‘The Lakes of Coolfin’ she showed her scope of influences. She closed her first set with ‘Wild, Feral & Free’ which she had composed using the shapeshifting Reynardine story as a hook for her experience of becoming confident in her own skin. Despite an autism diagnosis, she graduated in 2018 from the Traditional Music Degree course at Newcastle University.
In her next set Holly followed her composition ‘The Spectral Stag’ with Chris Wood & Hugh Lupton’s song ‘Bleary Winter’. She sang 3 more traditional songs ‘John Randall’, ‘Bonny Woodhall’ and ‘Young Collins’ with confident explanations of their origins, and one that she learned from Nick Dow ‘Burd Margaret’ that he believed was written by an Irish traveller. It was a joyous evening with varied contributions from nine floor singers and well worth the tenner!
