LYNNE HERAUD & PAT TURNER - Watching For Winkles
WildGoose Studios WGS430CD
Over the past 20 years, Lynne and Pat have secured their special niche on the English folk scene. A class act of the kind that never goes out of fashion, thoroughly entertaining with an accessible performing style and a flair for delivering an ideally balanced programme of songs that truly suit both their voices and personalities. As singers, they blend perfectly, Lynne’s appealing higher register ringing out and harmonising with Pat’s deeper, earthier timbre to give an extensive combined vocal range.
One can rely on any new album from Lynne and Pat (this is their seventh) to contain a sensibly varied batch of sparkling additions to their repertoire that will alternate between ‘serious’ and ‘frivolous’ and equal-handedly comprise traditional ballads, contemporary compositions and lighter, slightly risqué material either from the music-hall or self-penned in the approved cheeky-life-observational idiom. The ladies’ presentational insight is so well developed that such an obvious juxtaposition device, which could so easily feel contrived, in their hands feels as natural as breathing. Their team-talent for impeccable timing and flawless harmonies is right there on every track, while each lady’s individual solo passages also never fail to delight.
So, mindful of the need to winkle out particular highlights from the ladies’ latest scintillating collection, I’ll cite Pat’s compositions The North Wind and Hertfordshire Lullaby (though she can do fun too, as her Crafty Ladies and Brighton Belle prove); Lynne’s delish ode to fish (and chips); ballads The Brown Girl and The Two Brothers; and (The Wrecking Of) The Nightingale (from Helen Schneyer). The latter is one of a handful of other tracks that involves a modicum of careful accompaniment (guitar, English concertina, recorder), but invariably the focus is always on Lynne and Pat’s glorious harmonies.
Yes, Watching For Winkles is fair guaranteed to warm the cockles!
www.lynneandpat.co.uk
David Kidman
This review appeared in Issue 131 of The Living Tradition magazine