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The most immediately shocking thing about Shirley Collins’ seventh album is that it exists at all. Collins may be one of the folk revival’s most revered song collectors and vocalists, but for more than 30 years she was famous for not singing at all. She last released a new album in 1978, by which point her voice was already, she claimed, “letting her down” in the wake of a messy split from her husband, fellow musician Ashley Hutchings. “My voice got damaged, my ego got damaged, and my heart and everything,” she said, years later. “And I stopped being able to sing.”
The same year, during a performance of Lark Rise at the National Theatre, she opened her mouth to sing and nothing came out: she was later diagnosed with dysphonia, and retired from performance. That, most observers assumed, was that, but most observers had reckoned without the apparently fathomless powers of persuasion possessed by David Tibet, mastermind of experimental folk group Current 93 and something of a past master in encouraging lost esoteric artists – ranging from falsetto-voiced late 60s oddity Tiny Tim to wildly obscure krautrock band Sand – back to the spotlight, or at least something approaching it. He reissued her old recordings and enlisted Collins into Current 93’s remarkable rotating cast of collaborators, which also includes Björk, Andrew WK, former Crass frontman Steve Ignorant and experimental doom metal band Om, first to perform spoken-word pieces, then to sing, then finally performing a brief support slot at a 2014 London show, her first live appearance in 35 years.
Collins’ performances at the Current 93 gig and live appearance during her 80th birthday celebrations at Cecil Sharp House in London were rapturously received, but understandably a little tentative in tone. That sets them at odds with Lodestar: the second shocking thing about the album is how little it sounds like a one made by an 82-year-old who last recorded an album when Jim Callaghan was prime minister and Boney M were the biggest-selling band of the year. From the off, Lodestar is a strikingly confident and uncompromising album. The opening track features four different pieces of music: Awake Awake is filled with dire presentiments, images of rotting flesh and visions of imminent apocalypse – “repent, repent, sweet England, for dreadful days are near” – and bisected by a droning, ominous hurdy-gurdy and pipe instrumental by Ossian Brown, once of Coil, latterly one half of Cyclobe. It morphs into a May carol that carries the ineffable suggestion of something sinister lurking behind the good wishes, and finally into a sparse morris dance, complete with jangling leg-bells. The latter is perky and possessed of a pretty tune, but still feels oddly melancholy, as if the darkness of the track’s opening has somehow seeped into it.