Songs and poems from across the North-East have been brought together in a new compilation, which has also united opera singers with heavy metal frontmen. Nick Morrison tunes in.

WHAT do the lead singer of heavy metal group AC/DC, Inspector Morse's sidekick and the presenter of Football Focus have in common? Answer: they all appear on a collection of songs celebrating the history and culture of the North-East.

And Brian Johnson, Kevin Whately and Ray Stubbs are just some of the impressive list of luminaries to contribute towards the compilation. From actors including Robson Green, Denise Welch and Jimmy Nail, to singers Bryan Ferry, Sting and Alan Price, with opera singer Thomas Allen and even an MP thrown in, the sleeve notes boast an eclectic ensemble.

The reason they have come together is to play their part in recording - and preserving - some of the traditional songs and poems which, often, have been handed down for generations. The Northumbria Anthology will comprise around 300 songs on 20 CDs, most of them from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

"It is not just entertainment - it shows you a slice of history and how attitudes have changed over the years," says project co-ordinator Ken McKenzie, a former producer of radio commercials. "But it also shows how much things have stayed the same. People have the same problems: how to earn enough money or control their kids or deal with the elderly people in the family.

"We're making this fund of songs available to entertain people, but more importantly, from a historical point of view, we're making sure that these songs aren't lost. It is about preserving them and making them accessible."

The anthology was the brainchild of Brian Mawson, founder of Newcastle-based record company Mawson-Wareham. After initially concentrating on comedy records, including Larn Yersel' Geordie, Mawson-Wareham started building up an impressive back catalogue of folk music.

"Brian was aware that there were a lot more songs and poems around the region that had never been recorded. Some were published only as sheet music, some had been published but were no longer available and some existed only as fragments in scrap books and some were only ever in the oral tradition," Ken says.

"Brian's dream was to try and collect and record as much as possible of this material, especially the stuff that was in danger of being lost for ever, and that was how the anthology project came about."

After a Millennium Heritage grant of £90,000, the project took on folk singer Johnny Handle as a researcher, with the job of scouring archives and libraries, memory banks and antiquarian bookshops, to expose the North-East's musical traditions to the light.

He eventually came up with more than 3,000 songs and poems, but in some cases only the lyrics could be traced, and even then they were often incomplete or existed in a number of different forms. Where there was no tune, David Haslam, conductor of the Northern Sinfonia, came up with one himself. His orchestral arrangements sit alongside folk and rock arrangements on the collection.

There were only two criteria for the songs to be considered for inclusion: one was that all the songs should date from pre-1980, the other was a geographical limit. Although the collection aimed to represent music from the ancient kingdom of Northumbria, which stretched from the Humber to the Forth, the anthology restricted itself to songs originating from North Yorkshire to the Scottish border.

"That is seen as the North-East, and an area we feel has a coherence. Songs of Humberside and the West Riding and South Yorkshire are quite different in character," says Ken.

Once the songs had been collated, and whittled down to those which would be recorded, there was the question of who would record them and, as well as folk singers, rock stars and actors were also approached.

"It is nice not only to have all types of music in the collection, but also to have star names associated with it," says Ken. "It was not easy, because in the main they are very busy people, and artists are naturally concerned that their work will be properly represented and properly recorded, but I don't think anybody said no, although there are some who haven't been able to fit it in yet.

"But we know it is going to grow and grow. It is a bit like starting a shopping centre: as soon as you get Marks & Spencer on board, other people are likely to come in. To record these songs is important and would have been a great idea to do it by itself, but it is the icing on the cake that artists of this status have been interested enough to take part."

These big names include Sting, who submitted an already-recorded version of Water of Tyne with Jimmy Nail; Bryan Ferry, who contributed a version of The Lambton Worm; Brian Johnson, who sings Wor Geordie's Lost His Liggie and Byker Hill; former Eurythmic Dave Stewart, who performs The Blackleg Song, and opera singer Thomas Allen, who sings Footy Again' the Waal and Cushie Butterfield.

Actors featuring in the collection include Denise Walsh, with Hev Ye Seen Wor Jimmy?; Kevin Whately, on Farewell to the Burn; Robson Green, with Keep Yor Feet Still and Tim Healy, on the Neighbours Doon Belaa and dueting with Graeme Danby on Somebody Stole Me Bottle.

Two CDs with highlights from the collection have already been released, with the first batch of 5,000 already sold out. The 20 CD box set will be on sale soon, with 500 copies being sent to libraries in the region, but that will not spell the end of the project. New songs are being still being discovered and recorded, giving it a life of its own.

"We hope it will be an ongoing project but we have absolutely no idea what the future might bring," says Ken. We will go with the flow, and in ten years' time we might have enough material to bring out another box set."