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What an extraordinarily multi-talented woman Julie Fowlis is, says Colin Randall. A striking new recording bears witness to her quality.
Seventeen years have passed since, in my role as The Daily Telegraph‘s writer of folk music, I first reviewed an album by this outstanding Gaelic-speaking singer and musician from North Uist in the Outer Hebrides.
The album was called Cuilldh – Gaelic for retreat – and my article, which I shall reproduce in full below, was a glowing appraisal.
Fowlis has continued to perform, compose and record to widespread acclaim in a variety of settings. Her list of instruments played is formidable: Great Highland bagpipes, Scottish smallpipes, accordion, melodeon, flut, oboe, cor anglais, whistle and the harmonium-style Indian shruti box. Oboe and cor anglais? The latter is better known as the English horn and both formed part of her studies at Strathclyde University.
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Collaborations with the former Danu singer Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh – another woman of small island origin, in her case the Irish-speaking Inisheer, one off the Aran Isles – have been especially fruitful. Just before writing this piece, I was listening to their beautiful Cearcall mun Ghealaich from the 2017 album Alterum.
Fowlis has also worked with the American singer Mary Chapin Carpenter and, regularly, with her husband Eamon Soorley, who plays in and manages Danu’s current formation.
Now all of 45 and the mother of two girls, with a clutch of academic honours and awards under her belt, she combines with the Westf Highlands fiddler Ewen Henderson to offer a 200-year-old love song, Tha Sneachd Air Druim Uachdair (There is Snow on Drumochter), taken from a forthcoming collection of Scottish traditional music, Highlands. Drumochter is a mountain pass between the northern and southern central Scottish Highlands.
Doorley is in there with guitar-bouzouki, Martin O’Neill plays bodhran and Fowlis sings with customary purity and panache. Her delivery possesses hypnotic power that I cannot resist and it has quickly become the piece of music I go to first when driving.
The album, which intriguingly is designed to complement Lush Spa therapy treatments, is packed with traditional sounds intended to capture the Highlands and a proud musical and cultural heritage that embraces history, ancient wisdom and breathtaking natural beauty, not forgetting the unpredictable weather. Appearing with Fowlis, Henderson and Doorley are Simon Emmerson, Richard Evans, Ged Lynch, Oliver Cox, Martin O’Neill and Simon Richmond with Luise Wiehmann responsible for “creative direction”.
I shall probably give the massage a miss but cannot wait to hear the full album*.
That album review from 2007, by which time I had left the Telegraph but was still contributing articles on folk :
Few singers producing an album entirely in Gaelic could expect to reach anything but the smallest of audiences. Julie Fowlis, from the Outer Hebrides, rises to the challenge in style, turning a set of hypnotic old songs into implausibly accessible music that never seems old-fashioned.
The dynamism of the opening track will ensure airtime and perhaps spread the word to an even wider public than her previous exploits, including a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award.
But the slow ballads are equally impressive, a tribute to the vocal purity and force that overcomes the language obstacle. It can only be a matter of time before one of Fowlis’s less obvious inspirations, Madonna, herself something of a folk fan on the quiet, suggests making a record together.
* Highlands is due for release on Sept 27 and is available for pre-order at https://lush.lnk.to/Highlands
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