Definitely one to sit by the fire and relax to.
Listen out for "Song for Cove", it's one of the most beautiful songs I've heard in a while.
Folk Radio UK, August 2007

Singer and fiddler Mairi Campbell and guitarist Dave Francis have earned a reputation for making refined, often subtly understated music over the years, and their latest outing is well up to standard. Campbell's sweet, evocative singing is framed against spare guitar accompaniments and her own elegant fiddle playing, spiced up by the addition of Derek Hoy's meaty fiddle on Jean Yelland (an instrumental by Campbell) and the traditional song Higher Germany.
Kenny Mathieson, The Scotsman,
24 August 2007

Mairi Campbell and Dave Francis add strong original material to their usual Burns and trad Scottish repertoire. Haunting voice, sparse guitar and fiddle: a gentle poignancy pervades.
BBC Radio 2 – New releases

I've just got The Cast's "Greengold" and it is one of those that you love to put on when you really have time to savour it. Lovely voice, fine fiddle playing, sensitive guitar work and good arrangements are par for The Cast course but the songs are really special, mostly self-penned but a couple of Burns tracks. Congrats to our Simon for that bonny tune for "My Love's Like A Red, Red Rose" and "Song for Cove" has reduced me to tears twice already!
Sheena Wellington

Duo cast a spell with album of
natural wonders.

"We're not exactly prolific," laughs guitarist Dave Francis who, with his wife, the singer and fiddler Mairi Campbell, makes up the duo which goes by the name of The Cast. The pair have just brought out their third album, their first in 11 years - the age, adds Francis, of the eldest of their two young daughters: "Basically we've been concentrating on family life and other projects."

Greengold (out on the Greentrax label) has turned out to be worth the wait, however. It's a characteristically low-key but lyrical collection of songs punctuated by the occasional fiddle air and occasionally joined by Jock Tamson's Bairns' fiddler Derek Hoy (with whom Campbell plays in the Bella McNab's Dance Band). Campbell's voice can stop the clock, and there is a pervading sense of renewal and even transcendence in this material - perhaps most notably in a wonderful rendering of the old Shetland solstice tune The Day Dawn, here given words by Jean Hazledean, a member of the Sangstream folk song choir that Campbell runs in Edinburgh.

"One of our aims when we set out to make the album was to try and get a unified feel," says Francis, "but, in terms of the songs, it's probably a certain degree of serendipity that there is that connection between them. It's mostly stuff that we've been performing for quite some time, although one of the songs, There is a Light, was basically finished the night before we went into the studio."

There is a Light is a song of optimism amid a deeply damaged world, and reflects Campbell's long-standing interest in yoga and meditation. Don't expect any arcane chanting, however: this music is deeply rooted in the tradition, and in the elements.

The less benign side of nature is observed in Song for Cove, about the vicious storm of 1881 which sank hundreds of fishing boats along the east coast, including those from the little Berwickshire fishing village of Cove, half of whose men never returned.
The song, sung by Campbell with spoken interludes from Francis, was commissioned for last year's 125th anniversary of the disaster. "We performed the piece from the deck of a little crab boat in the harbour," recalls Francis, "and the people who had gathered for the ceremony were all up on the quay above us. It was very moving."

Francis was until recently a part-time music and traditional arts officer with City of Edinburgh Council and keeps busy with DISTIL, a cross-genre composers development project. He is also involved with another husband-and-wife creative partnership, David Milligan and Corinna Hewat, in working with Ceol Mor, the folk-fusion big band that emerged out of the Aberdeen International Youth Festival, and whose large-scale creative ferment, Francis agrees, represents the other end of the of the folk spectrum from The Cast's quintessentially spare approach.

When not playing, Campbell teaches - she has weekend fiddle courses coming up on Lismore over the next few months - and occasionally plays viola in classical ensembles but, she admits, the duo is unlikely to hit the road at the moment, apart from some possible house concerts. She sounds apologetic: "We've tended to avoid the demands of touring because of the family life. We really should do a bit more."

In Scots, "cast" has implications of fate, or the divining of it, and of course, it's also what you do with a spell. They may not put themselves about much, but when The Cast work their own particular magic they manage to invoke a very particular sense of timelessness, of music emerging from shadows and, naturally, into the light.
Jim Gilchrist, The Scotsman, 31 August 2007

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