Folk & World
Radie Peat has released “Hares on the Mountain”, which opens “No Human Tongue Can Tell”, her first solo album. It comes out on 13 November through Rough Trade, it is produced by John “Spud” Murphy and it runs to nine songs. Peat sings in Lankum and is one quarter of ØXN.
The record started with a film. “When I was in my 20s I watched a documentary on Mike Oldfield making Tubular Bells,” she says. “The idea just stuck that I would like to try record like that, where you write and play all the intersecting parts. I found the idea of being limited by your own mind and abilities, with all the blind spots and personal preferences, very appealing.”
They are all traditional songs, arranged and in some cases reworked by her. She learned “Hares on the Mountain” from Shirley Collins, who recorded it in 1959, in 1964 and in 2023. “Still I Love Him” she found in the Irish Traditional Music Archives. The rest are “The Moon and Stars”, “Willow Garden”, “Luisne”, “Same Old Man”, “Bonnie Boy” and “Cailín Deas”.
Of “The Moon and Stars”, the other advance single, she says that “there are coded references to unwanted pregnancies and abortions within the song, as well as references to rue, a herb which was used to cause miscarriage”. And she explains what she was after: “I wanted to represent these experiences from the woman’s perspective – to connect us with her experience.”
The dates announced are London’s Union Chapel on 3 November, which is listed as sold out, Vicar Street in Dublin on the 20th, the Paradiso in Amsterdam on 31 January 2027, La Trabendo in Paris on 1 February and the Barbican in London on 19 May. There is none in Spain.
Text by Alba Puiggròs