Jez Lowe and The Bad PenniesWotcheor! Review

It’s been a great year for albums about the northeast of England, and its rich history. The folk duo Megson released the outstanding The Longshot, mixing old Teesside and Tyneside songs with their own material, and now comes another highly original tribute to the region from singer-songwriter Jez Lowe and his band. Lowe was inspired by a BBC radio programme, Wot Cheor, Geordie, broadcast back in the 1940s, and this album includes bursts of crackly radio effects and fragments of old songs, interspersed with new arrangements.

His songs are, for the most part, cheerful, easy-going and nostalgic, concerned with life in the northeast from the war years to the present. He starts with Barnstorming, a rousing tribute to the fiddle-player Jack Armstrong, leader of The Barnstormers. It’s a great folk-dance tune in which Lowe’s guitar work is backed by rousing fiddle playing from Kate Bramley and Hinny Pawsey, with Andy May playing the Northumbrian pipes. There’s more praise for the dance music of the war years on A Tonic for the Toffs, and Back to the Land Girls, a cheerful story of agricultural workers enjoying a night out.

Elsewhere, Lowe makes use of sturdy regional melodies on The Lost Piper and The Judas Bus, an angry piece about strike-breakers during the mining protests of the Thatcher era. The demise of the mining communities has been a popular subject for many songwriters, but Lowe’s approach is original warm-hearted. The Ex-Pitman’s Pot-Holing Pub Quiz Team tells the story of miners who have "lost their jobs to big chiefs and bosses, and lost their allotments to new city by-passes", but who refuse to let misfortune get them down. Instead, they compete in quiz games, becoming experts in a whole variety of different subjects. Lowe treats the story in the style of a cowboy ballad, with accordion backing.

Any album dealing with everyday life in the northeast has to include a song about football, and the best song track here is It’s a Champion Life, the bitter-sweet story of a Newcastle United fan – when he discovers the man who has saved his life supports rival club Sunderland, the story takes a dramatic twist. Not everything is quite up to that standard, but Lowe is a singular talent, and you don’t have to come from Gateshead or Newcastle to enjoy his work.