Bridget Hayden: 'A lot of Cold Blows The Rain was going back to my roots'

Recorded with harmonium player Sam Mcloughlin and violinist Dan Bridgewood-Hill – here performing as The Apparitions – it’s an exploration of songs such as Blackwater Side and She Moved Through the Fayre that were passed down to Hayden by her late mother.

“She was a folk singer, she never actually performed but she was really talented, so she knew a lot of traditional Irish and Americana songs which she would play,” Hayden explains.

“She never really understood what it was that I did, so one of the things I wanted to do was to make something that I could play her that she could understand. She did just about manage to hear it before she died (last September).

“A lot of it was kind of going back to my roots, which were more along those (traditional) lines. I kind of rejected it in my early 20s and didn’t look back, then as the years rolled on I suppose I did incorporate a lot of those songs that are on the album in my noise set. I wouldn’t play them on a banjo, I would play them much more gnarly, but I was accruing a repertoire of folk songs in the background for the entire time. I would often sing those songs with friends and family.”

Fans had also “nagged” her to strip off all the effects and let her voice come through on the recording. “A lot of the time people didn’t even realise that I was singing, (they said) it would sound like an instrument on the recording,” she says.

Finally, there was a “serendipitous propulsion that came to a head” when Hayden was asked to play at St Bridget’s Festival in Manchester. “I was added to the bill at the last minute and I took all my noise gear, I had a couple of friends helping me taking my amps and everything, and none of it worked,” she recalls. “I was frantically trying to get my sound together in time. In the end I just stripped it all away and played the folk set.”

Cold Blows The Rain might conjure up images of rainswept Yorkshire moors but it was actually recorded at Todfellows Hall in the middle of summer 2022. “Most of the takes we got were done at nighttime because it was uncharacteristically hot weather,” she recalls. “It just didn’t feel right doing it in that light, so we waited.”

Hayden reflects that rural landscapes have often influenced her work albeit perhaps subconsciously. “The places I’ve lived have mainly been Shropshire and Todmorden, and I would say the climates are pretty much the same. I’ve usually lived more rurally, I’ve struggled to live in cities,” she says. “I do very much relate to nature and the weather and as I’m singing the words I can feel the environment and that possibly comes out through the voice.

“Also, I suppose Todmorden’s quite unique because it’s in a very deep valley which has definitely had an influence. I’ve lived there 12 years now and there is something I’ve described as like an emotional soup. You’re all on the bottom of the (Calder) valley, they call it valley fever, it does make you go mad and you don’t realise it until you get out on the tops and you look down at the town and you get perspective. You need to get up and out, I’d say. That’s one thing I’ve noticed living there and something that everyone I speak to agrees with. You have to extract yourself from it to know how it’s affecting you.”

The eight songs that she chose to cover on the album were the ones that “wouldn’t let (her) go” from the repertoires of Shirley and Dolly Collins, Karen Dalton, Anne Briggs and Frankie Armstrong – the last of which, she says, is “not that well-known but she did do a beautiful version of Lovely On The Water”.

“There are more,” she says, “but those were the ones that made sense as a whole. There were a couple that my mum taught me that didn’t make it (onto this record). Partly because she just did them better than me. I didn’t want to be compared, just within our own family.”

Hayden’s next project for the label Folklore Tapes is based on a Shropshire legend. “It’s specifically on the legend of Llynclys Pool,” she says. “I’ve written and improvised mainly piano pieces based on the atmosphere of that myth. It’s a myth of a sunken palace, a palace that was cursed when the heathens that lived there refused to listen to the teachings of St Germanus. They were told that they would be cursed for six generations and the story goes that six generations passed and they were having a party and a harpist that was playing at the party went out for a cigarette, turned around and the whole place was flooded and underwater. There was no sign of the palace, just his harp floating on the water.

“That (project) started off with looking into Mary Webb, who my mum introduced me to. The road into all that mythology was her book Precious Bane and it’s the centenary this year of the publication of that. It’s a fantastic book written in Shropshire dialect, it references of lot of the folklore documented in a book called A Sheaf of Gleanings that’s from the late 1800s written by a woman of that era and I think it’s the first written document of that oral tradition of Shropshire folklore.”

​​​​Cold Blows the Rain is out now on Basin Rock. The album launch is at Natural Endings, Todmorden on January 18. https://www.skiddle.com/whats-on/Oldham/Natural-Endings/Cold-Blows-the-Rain-album-launch/40509849/