REVIEW: Hels Pattison at Strings 19.2.26

IF our Island's singer-songwriters (and there's a fair few of those, right?) have been looking a little down in the dumps of late, it might be that they've had no new playmates to knock about with.

That changed, though, with last night's visit from Geordie lass Hels Pattison, fresh from Lindisfarne on her furthest foray from home to date. Reckon her esteemed supports, the obsessively harmonious Triami and the cheeky-country five-gallon-hatted honky tonker Corrinne Atkins got as much as they gave out of this meeting of musical minds, as all three acts supported each other with intent ears, much bonhomie and virtual back-slapping all round.

Hels and accompanying guitarist cantered through a swinging set of confessionals, lost love stories, self-sabotage and disastrous crushes from an oral memoir that comes sugar-coated in moreish melodies and a forceful voice that sits somewhere very special on the Mary Chapin Carpenter to Dar Williams spectrum. Seriously: this woman can sing.

Hels wears her life on her sleeves - so the barbed apology letter that is "Just What I Do", the family non-favourite covid memoir "On The Horizon" and particularly her ode to her obsessive crush "Ruby" strike authentic chords. Ruby is a real person of that same name, by the way. And she's not too chuffed about being immortalised in this song, by all accounts.

"She just avoids me now," Hels informs us with a guilty shrug. "Oops."

Photo: Jake Curran