A special album of ‘songs only’ from the BBC Radio 2 documentary series The 2006 Radio Ballads – a stand-alone companion piece to the six-CD Radio Ballads collection which has been released over the past quarter by Gott Discs. The documentary series was built on interviews about issues of our time – hunting with hounds, the decline of the steel and shipbuilding industries, living with HIV/AIDS, the lives of the showmen and women of the travelling fairgrounds and how music attempted to heal Northern Ireland’s Troubles. The songs were inspired by and written from accounts of actual life experience, and speech and song were interwoven to create a rarely-attempted self-narrating storytelling style in the Ballads. Musical Director John Tams and series music producer Andy Seward have gone back and stripped out the speech so the songs stand alone in their own right. The twenty songs on this album have been drawn from across the Ballads series and represent just one-third of the songs specially commissioned for this remarkable and critically acclaimed radio series.

1. Mucky River (John Tams)
2. Curtains (Kate Rusby)
3. Crane Driver (Julie Matthews)
4. Fireland (John Tams)
5. Hobo (Karine Polwart)
6. Unprotected (Bob Fox)
7. Comes The Hour (Chris While)
8. The King George Hunt (Lester Simpson & Martin Simpson)
9. On Horseback (Kellie While)
10. Good Dog And True (Bob Fox)
11. Tradition Never Dies (Chris While)
12. Lily Gilders (John Tams)
13. Scholars In Winter (Barry Coope)
14. Different Drums (Cara Dillon)
15. These Troubles (Tommy Sands)
16. When The Music Starts To Play (Cara Dillon)
17. Old Hammerhead (Jez Lowe)
18. The Great Voltaire (Bob Fox)
19. You Can’t Weld A Body (Karine Polwart)
20. Only Remembered (Bob Fox)