Amy Leach and Alasdair Paul - They’ll Aye Remain

Although they’ve been singing together for some years, this is the Scottish duo’s debut album, a rich and largely obscure collection drawn from the Scots traditional song canon and many sung in full Scots leid with Leach on piano and Paul on guitars, joined by Bevan Morris on double bass with producer Rachel Newton adding vocals on two tracks.

Featuring Leach on lead, it opens with Stone and Lime Wall, a rarely sung love song, quite possibly owning to its somewhat dour metaphors of love gone wrong, though hope surfaces as she sings “at our next meeting, our joy we’ll renew/We’ll change the green and yellow for the violet so blue”.

Equally stripped back, some may recognise the dark and hypnotic Mirk Mirk as Robert Burns’ retelling of Fair Annie of Lochroyan, getting impregnated by Lord Gregory, who denies her, culminating in her and the child drowning and he committing suicide in guilt and shame.
With a minimal guitar accompaniment, another of similar dark mood is the five-minute Mary Mild, ostensibly sung in the voice of one of Mary Queen Of Scot’s ladies in waiting, duo to be executed in Embra when the little bairn is found “A wallowing in its bluid” as, mentioning Beaton, Seton and Carmichael, she sings how “Last nicht there were four Marys/The nicht there’ll be but three”, but defiant in her fate.

A song in praise of shepherds, Herd Laddie is more musically and lyrically upbeat, a poem in praise of shepherds by Liddesdale shepherd John ’Bluebell’ Byers set to music by
Johnny Handle, Leach on lead and Paul popping up on the refrain. With Newton providing the second voice, the languorously-paced To A Meeting is a variant of Unconstant Lover by way of The Cuckoo for the last verse, spinning a familiar tale of unreliable men.

Learnt from the singing of Maureen Jelks, Rue And Thyme is another tale of love gone sour, better known as Sprig Of Thyme, the version here constructed around sparse piano notes. It’s not strictly of Scottish origin and neither is the swaying rhythm The Carter, an Oxfordshire song which celebrates the life of a carter and his horses on which Paul sings lead as well as providing the courtly-like fingerpicking, Leach adding harmonies and piano.

Newton returns for the sprightly Tansey, a delightfully mean-spirited children’s song (another involving an unmarried woman giving birth) described as a ’game for girls’ with words collected by Hugh McAlister from children he taught in Lochwinnoch, featuring the repeated line “here’s a lady’s laid down tae die”,

Sparked by the singing of Lizzie Higgins, unaccompanied duet Babby Allen derives from Barbara Allen and follows the same narrative of the singer being visited on his death bed and she cold-heartedly refusing to kiss him back to life. Again departing from the Scottish path, Something For Dave is a guitar instrumental written specifically by Paul for the late Dave Brocksopp, a noted figure on the Newcastle folk scene, where he’s now based.

Higgins is again the inspiration for the slow and melancholic Young Emslie, a murder ballad better known as Young Edwin in the Lowlands Low in which Emslie’s sailor lover returns a wealthy man, she warning him not to let her parents know who he is, as they end up stabbing and robbing him in the pub.

Set to a backdrop of hesitant piano notes, Leach on lead with interjections from Paul, the album ends with Be Kind Tae Yer Nainsel (A Scottish Highlands word for self), a variant of Land Of The Lea a 18th-century death ballad written by Lady Caroline Nairne, referring to a mythical land of the faithful or heaven, the narrator speaking to their spouse about joining them in the afterlife.

A celebrated traveller and traditional singer, Lucy Stewart once said songs like these would “aye remain”. Leach and Paul are perfect examples of why.