Fresh from this year’s Fairport Cropredy Convention I returned to my desk to find Hitting the Ground Running (Fat Cat Records), the latest CD from the award-winning duo Chris While and Julie Matthews. Both singers will be very familiar to Fairport fans, having graced the Cropredy stage on many occasions over the years, performing together and with the band.

Chris While memorably ‘stood in’ for the late Sandy Denny as Fairport’s original line-up performed the entire Liege and Lief album at the 2007 festival. Both were key members of that folk super-group The Albion Band, back in the mid-1990s.

Chris and Julie are rightly regarded as being among the best female vocalists currently on the folk circuit, and this album illustrates why they have been described as being ‘awesomely talented’.

This latest offering from the duo finds them on a musical world tour, from the mountains of Andalucia and the forests of Australia before returning to the wilds of Northumberland — the landscape which provides the inspiration for two of the album’s stand-out songs, Rock of Gelt and Bridge Over Time. These tracks come from a recent project which explored the history of Hadrian’s Wall in poetry and song.

There is a touch of Americana in Darkside of the Wood, and the title track Hitting the Ground Running, but the duo let their folk roots show on The Coldest Winds Do Blow, and the beautiful Where the Year has Gone, a track that went into my ‘all-time favourite songs playlist’ after the first hearing.

If you want to catch up with Chris While and Julie Matthews live — a worthwhile experience — they are performing locally at Didcot’s Cornerstone Arts Centre on October 21 and at The Mill, Banbury, on October 23.