Ian Stephenson - Return From Helsinki

In late 2023, Ian Stephenson was diagnosed as having a malignant brain tumour. With no time to lose and bills to pay, the highly-regarded multi-instrumentalist, composer and recording engineer launched a crowdfunding campaign to allow him to publish a tune book and album.

The result is Return From Helsinki, featuring 19 of his own tunes written across a career that’s seen him at the centre of bands including 422, Baltic Crossing and KAN not to mention regularly performing with the likes of Kathryn Tickell, Alistair Anderson and Andy May.

Many of his accomplices from these projects pop up on an album that’s bursting with life. The Northumbrian contingent weigh in on The Park Hill Jig, a rollicking number in the traditional North-East style, while banstorming polka set Ain’t Bin Nowhere brings energy in spades courtesy of his Baltic Crossing bandmates.

The greater half of the album is given over to showing Stephenson’s subtler side as a composer and musician on slower tunes. The atmospheric intro to the title track sets up a special tune for the composer that sits alongside several others written to mark key events and people in the lives of people around him.

Whether leading with guitar on Without Walls and Audrey’s, or backing others with great musicality on A Year With You, Stephenson shows off his range sitting alongside the boiler room strumming of tracks like Embleton. Better still, 3 Sisters sees him doing both at once with jig time guitar you could set your watch to accompanying the touching melody teased out of his melodeon.

A brilliant album in its own right made all the more potent by its context, the most moving part comes right at the end with Stephenson sitting down at the pipe organ in his parish church on closing track You’ll Find Me, written about his own intended resting place. This lends it a funereal feel, not in the sense of being doleful or ghostly but as a restful intercession, at peace with the world.

In producing Return From Helsinki Stephenson hasn’t just turned out one of the instrumental folk albums of the year, but underlined his own legacy in contributing a whole number of infectious tunes to the English folk repertoire.

Going by the material here, the words “It’s an Ian Stephenson tune” should one day be common currency both on stages and in sessions.