Needle & Thread

Dom Prag is a young singer and guitarist from Southampton who discovered the world of traditional folk song when he was 18. This is his second album, and Show of Hand’s Phil Beer is on hand as producer, fiddler and backing singer, alongside The Wilderness Yet’s Rosie Hodgson and Rowan Piggott, sharing effective a cappella vocals with Prag on the Luddite song ‘Foster’s Mill’.

Although there are plenty of trad songs here – from the opening transportation ballad ‘Van Diemen’s Land’, featuring some excellent guitar work, through a tender ‘Lovely William’, from Peter Bellamy via Paddy Tunney, to the hardships of ‘The Brisk Lad’, a Dorset song recorded by Mike Waterson – his self-penned title-song is among the standouts and the album’s powerful closer. In contrast to the strident energy of mining and striking songs such as ‘South Medomsley Strike’ and ‘Oakey Strike Eviction’ by the Tyneside balladeer Tommy Armstrong, ‘Needle & Thread’ inhabits a reflective, interior lyrical landscape, reminiscent of Al Stewart, and set to a spare guitar and a parlour-side vocal. He adapts song lyrics from his own poems – he’s been known to set the likes of Keats and Larkin to music, too – and his felicity with a line matches his musical chops. A young singer to look out for.