Kite

Delicate, haunting and heartbreaking are just a few of the words that have been used to describe the music of Jonny Kearney and Lucy Farrell. After meeting at Newcastle University 6 years ago, they formed an unlikely alliance - unlikely because Jonny with his bittersweet kitchen-sink dramas, shows sympathy with American storytellers like Dylan and Tom Waits, while Lucy's traditional folkie upbringing and vocal style couldn't be more English. Their six-track EP entitled `The North Farm Sessions' received 4 stars from The Guardian and Q, BBC Radio 1, 2, 3 and 6 airplay, and sold heavily on tour supports with The Unthanks and Bellowhead, and at summer festivals including Green Man, End of the Road and Cambridge.

It speaks volumes about the quality and quantity of their song-writing that non of the EP tracks feature on debut album `Kite'. There is continuity however, in Kearney and Farrell's relationship with Adrian McNally, pianist, producer and arranger for The Unthanks. Like the EP, Kite was recorded at the farmhouse home of McNally and wife Rachel Unthank. Jonny and Lucy dedicate the album to Rachel and Adrian's son George, who was born in the last month of making the album. "We rate them so highly, it just feels like a responsibility and a pleasure to do whatever we can for them," says McNally, who wrote the string arrangements on the album as well as producing it. "What they have is magical and ought to take them much further than we could ever hope!"

Touches of eccentricity come from local talent including Chris Hibbard (trombone), Paul Ruddick (sax and clarinet) and Kearney's old schoolmate and probably England's finest fiddle player, Peter Tickell (Peatbog Fairies, Sting, Kathryn Tickell Band). While much of the record retains the quiet but prickly intimacy of Jonny's and Lucy's live duo performances, McNally occasionally uses Unthanks band mates to add colour and texture to the storytelling, Chris Price adding ukelele, Dean Ravera double bass, and McNally himself playing piano on the traditional Peggy Gordon and Lucy Farrell's one self-penned contribution to the album, Winter Got Lost."