Original notes for the 1997 Waters of Tyne cassette:-


I was born in North Shields and brought up on Tyneside. My Mother and Father have always loved music - my Mother is a fine singer. I grew up way happy in Whitley Bay by the sea, and playing along the unending deserted railway track with its dust and darkness and old bits of sleeper wood which I once saw as the Cross. It ran by the broad cornfields swept up to my Mothers home village of Earsdon where the pits were and the wellspring of many songs.

My Granny sang the songs of Tyneside with her great ringing voice and joined with others singing arrangements of these in a choir. My Dad worked on the River Tyne and had many a wee tale of the River and of old North Shields I grew mad keen on Geordie songs. Another memory of place and happiness is the village of Wolsingham in Weardale high on the Durham uplands with its broad skies and keening winds where my Great Granny's people came to work the lead mines and marble quarries. She sang and played a horn in the chapel band. I have a photo of her proud in her Sunday best side by side with the band clutching all manner of instruments - bits of trombones, ear trumpets and even a cistern.

When I met Sedayne in my teens his music was to me rooted in the North East but sounded unlike others I'd heard. I believed in it and spoke to me of what is and has been. We have been playing music for nearly 20 years and it is the belief in what each other does that is vital to the songs - they need honesty.

The sound of pipes in singing links Northumberland, Scotland and Ireland. Lizzie Higgins from the Aberdeenshire travelling people became a good and generous friend passing on the pipe singing to me. Jane Turriff also of the Aberdeenshire Travelling people has been a friend for many years. I've heard Jane strike up with a song at the sink when filling the kettle holding me and her Grandson transfixed. Always with her whole heart diddling pipe tunes, ranting bothy ballads or spinning a tale of the days when she travelled the old routes of Scotland. Jane accompanies herself on harmonium, piano, or accordion following the song this way and that - rendering it anew. Lizzie told me that you make a song your own but can't keep it forever. The music and songs here are of our time and landscape.

The songs are traditional, sung and treasured in the hearts of people over the years. They give keeks into nature and the ways of people in hate or love or trying to get by, songs of dread and longing for the sea, the dark mines, or a lovers arms.

Clive Powell, Edinburgh, November 1997



i) Several of the songs here feature instrumental sections; like the other music featured as accompaniment these arise out of the modality of the songs, in most cases quite spontaneously; a rough music, akin to chap-book woodcuts somewhat cryptically juxtaposed. The instruments, like the songs themselves, determine the perameters of this music in terms of both the probable and the improbable; whilst their patterns are ancient it is not so much about the past as it is about the continuity of process: the same continuity that rests between the plough and the bread oven.

ii) So twa braw lads born within the rare reek of the Tyne in North Shields which has lingered no matter how far we have roamed. At some point in the 19th century, my Great Grandfather sailed up the Tyne from Cork, establishing himself as a tailor on the Castle Garth Stairs in Newcastle (the quayside for sailors, the Castle Garth for tailors...) thus mixing the Irish blood with the Northumbrian and giving me enough cause to ponder provenance over the years, concluding that if there is any origin it is the Tyne itself - constant to its own condition; a river of passage, of arrivals and departures; a river that links our blood to the sea, and from there to all points on Planet Earth and beyond.

iii) The present programme is our acknowledgement to the river and its two main tributaries: coal and humanity. On one level it's a simple sequence of traditional songs in which the narrative continuity is implicit rather than explicit, in which some of the links are more obvious than others. On another it's something else altogether more mischievous - mischief being the subjective legacy of course; the mischief that lies at the heart of the musical arrangements. The main point being to first acknowledge the purity of the traditional material before seeing where that might lead: what areas might be implied and what approaches adopted to some notion of appropriateness without being overtly 'folksy' about any of it.

iv) It is fitting that the recording begins with the creaking of the harmonium pedals in dialogue with the birds outside the window*; this sets the nature of the music, which endures as a gesture. Nothing more, nor indeed anything less.

Sean Breadin / aka Sedayne / Old Pit, Durham City, November 1997

* This relates to the beginning of Waters of Tyne (see HYEM)