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NINEBARROW

Album: The Hour Of The Blackbird

Release Date: October 2025

Musical style: Folk

NInebarrow have teamed up with Hart Voices and The Chantry

Singers to produce an album like you have never heard before!.

▶A chance meeting at a concert in Farnborough, Hampshire, by

Ninebarrow folk duo, Jon and Jay, and choirmaster Roy Rashbrook, led

to a charity single created during lockdown. The track, “The Hour of the

Blackbird”, was a collaboration between Ninebarrow, Hart Voices and

the Chantry Singers. The enthusiastic response to that single led to a

series of live concerts with Jon & Jay and the Choirs.

For their sixth album, Ninebarrow have teamed up again with Roy and

the Choirs to bring a completely new dimension to some of their best

known songs, a mix of the their own compositions, traditional songs

and others from Patrick Wolf, Bob Whitley and Ewen Carruthers.

The album opens with the haunting “Names in the Sky” and sets the

scene for what is to come. The following 5 tracks are all from the pens

of John & Jay, including the title track, “Summer Fires”, which comes

across in a much softer vein than the original, and somehow just

works. We are then treated to “The Weeds”, a song about a pointless

loss of a relationship and a good life, then “The Sea”, a story of the end

of the Roman Occupation described by East European conscripts

dreaming of going home.

“Teignmouth”, from the pen of Patrick Wolf, comes next followed by

“Coming Home” from Jon’s father Bob Whitley from his story of

Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world. We then go to one of those

Ninebarrow songs, “Nestledown”, straight from their love of the county

of Dorset.

The traditional “John Barleycorn” is sung acapela with the Choirs

coming in after the first verse, adding a rich background then gradually

joining in the choruses. “Under The Fence”, a song about the plight of

refugees is also subtly altered by the addition of the Choirs.

The last two tracks mirror that of the “A Pocketful of Acorns” album,

with Ewen Carruthers’s “Farewell Shanty” and the traditional shanty

“Sailors All”.

I do not know of another such collaboration between a folk band

and Choirs, but this just works, adding the backdrop of voices to

the already perfect harmonies of Jon & Jay.