Orfeo marks a bold and confident step for Fay Hield. The album contains powerful interpretations of traditional material and finds Fay fronting an all-star band with Jon Boden, Andy Cutting, Sam Sweeney and Rob Harbron. Fay Hield has crafted a truly remarkable second album for Topic Records. The album is destined to be recognised as one of the finest albums of the year. The powerful arrangements of traditional songs are fabulously focused around her voice. With such an impressive array of musicians the instrumental interplay will come as little surprise.
Orfeo features 11 superbly arranged traditional songs, including lead track, ‘Sir Orfeo’, based on a 13th Century retelling of the epic supernatural Greek fable, Orpheus and Eurydice. Fay’s gift for unearthing rare and interesting material is well represented throughout, including the obscure but beguiling nursery rhyme ‘Naughty Baby’ and the feisty Lancashire mill-girl tour-de-force ‘The Old ‘Arris Mill’. An Anne Briggs inspired version of ‘The Cuckoo’ is included. In folklore, the bird’s call is often used as a signal heralding spring and the number of times it is heard during the season is said to translate into the number of years until a death or a marriage. The delightfully named ‘Tarry Trousers’, is a song Fay discovered through singer, Frankie Armstrong, but which was also well known by Dickens (and quoted in his novel, Dombey and Son). ‘Wicked Serpent’ meanwhile, originates from the US and is based on an incident relating to the unfortunate Timothy Myrick of Springfield Mountain when he died after having been bitten by a ‘ratel snake one August…’
