Tom Kitching - Where There’s Brass

While a lot of people will associate folk music with shanties and songs of the high seas, there’s less in the traditional canon about those who live and work on Britain’s inland waterways. Putting that right is fiddle and mandolin player Tom Kitching with new album and book Where There’s Brass.

Whereas predecessor volume Seasons of Change took in the length and breadth of England,
Where There’s Brass is focussed on a much more compact area, but no worse off for variety of scenes and characters. Telling the story of six months living on board former oil boat Spey on London’s canal network (and the journey down there from Manchester) it provides a window into the liveaboard boating community there while looking out at their city surroundings, mixed with a healthy dose of understated humour.

The book does an engaging job of describing the intricacies of canal boating for the benefit of the uninitiated - whoever knew a summary of the inner workings of vintage Bolinder engines could be so captivating?

At the same time Kitching provides a potted modern history of the canal network through radio ballad-esque interviews with his parents and other old hands. He also stops at junctures to make his views on the present state of the waterways and their management by the Canal and River Trust known without feeling high handed.

Though the 10 original tunes making up the album can be enjoyed on their own, they gain an extra context when heard alongside the book.

Spirited jig set The Old Country takes its name from an amusing anecdote about English folk musicians passing their native tunes off as authentic Irish traditional material (with a bit of
hurdy gurdy and Nyckelharpa from co-producers Jon Loomes and Rakoczy thrown in to make it extra genuine). The Brentford Lullaby turns out to be an ironic title for the sweetest mandolin waltz, while the strangely affecting Polska for a Lost Rubber Duck sees Kitching switches back and forth between full-bodied double stops and scurrying triplets.

That use of the full range of notes, tones and dynamics on the fiddle in an unshowy way is one of his great strengths. It’s there on vigorous hornpipe Grub Street which is full of slides and Kitching’s trademark exuberance as well as more subdued numbers such as Nightsoil, a suitably filthy schottische which provides the muck implied by the book’s title.

In that sense it’s almost a shame that nearly half of the tracks feature Kitching on mandolin, though he brings a similarly deft touch to tunes such as A Long Time Between Sunsets where he teases the arpeggios out or the crisp Playford-style bustle of On The Shoulders of Giants.

However, this does have the advantage of meshing all the better with longtime collaborator Marit Falt, present as one-woman rhythm section on all ten tracks and composer of two of them. She uses the Lätmandola to make her single instrument sound like many, the deepest reaches of the lower strings contrasting with the bright strumming of the upper ones, providing intriguing but not ostentatious choices of chords and countermelodies.

There’s plenty of smart picking as well, such as the tight riff that circles round during The Churn, the two musicians interlocked tightly.

What comes across throughout the project is the number of years spent working by Kitching on honing the craft and studying the traditions of both boating and performing folk music to great effect. You can only imagine that off the back of it there’ll be many folkies with a newfound interest in canals and boaters developing a taste for instrumental folk.