Trembling Bells and Mike Heron at the Exeter Phoenix

Trembling Bells and Mike Heron stopped off at Exeter last Sunday night to play at the Phoenix during the lengthy wanderings of their 'Circle is Unbroken' tour. This was an exciting meeting of adventurous folk past and present, as well as a coming together of music which meant much to me as a teenager (the Incredible String Band) and a band which is one of my current favourites. I had anticipated a standard evening of two halves, with Mike Heron playing a solo set followed by the Trembling Bells in all their lyrical, electric glory. But this was a much more special occasion which amounted to a celebration of the Incredible String Band’s music, and an acknowledgement by the members of the band of the influence it had exerted on them. It was enjoyable to see the looks of sheer pleasure and enjoyment on Alex Neilson and Lavinia Blackwall’s faces as they sang these songs which had evidently become part of their bloodstream with one of their authors.

It was actually a Robin Williamson song which began proceedings. Maya sees him in full mystical flow, the lyrics embracing the full spectrum of mythic and religious imagery whilst the music marries east and west with a blend of Western folk and Indian vocal traditions. Trembling Bells lead singer Lavinia Blackwall took Williamson’s sinuous vocal lines and made them her own, her early music background (with its inherent Moorish elements) proving an ideal grounding for the Eastern influenced melismas which twist the ends of several lines into baroque swirling smoke trails. Williamson’s vocal style proved surprisingly suitable for translation into a female soprano register, in fact, as other of his songs which Lavinia sang during the evening proved. Waltz of the New Moon from the Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter album was particularly effective, with Lavinia and Georgia Seddon emulating the harp and harpsichord sway of the original via analogous keyboard sounds. The Cold Winds of February, a standout track from Hard Rope and Silken Twine, the last ISB album (made in 1974) was a real showcase for her soaring voice, Williamson’s writing displaying a significant shift towards traditional Celtic styles. The simple organ accompaniment, overlaid with Nick Pynn’s fluttering penny whistle, created a hushed and mesmerising mood.

Trembling Bells - Carbeth

Mike Heron wandered on towards the end of the song, in time to add his voice to the spirited group rendition of the final chorus, appropriately introducing the evening with the refrain ‘all the world is but a play, be thou the joyful player’. He had broken his arm, which hung strapped and immobile at his side, so his participation was limited to the use of his voice, with its distinctive phrasing and seemingly inbuilt optimism. It’s a voice which contains an implied smile, which was indeed present for much of the time. There was no guitar, nor yet any sitar, although I suspect he has long since put that unwieldy instrument to one side. Heron was reasonably adept on the sitar, but his guitar never transcended the functional role of accompaniment to his songs. It was a singer-songwriter’s tool, effectively, with none of the virtuosity of a John Renbourne or Bert Jansch. Heron modestly admitted as much, introducing Mike Hastings with the self-deprecating observation that his replacement was ‘almost as good as me’. Hastings, the more than accomplished Trembling Bells guitarist (who has also played with Heron in other contexts) took up the acoustic instrument, leaving his quicksilver West Coast electric lines for other occasions. This made for interesting variants on the handful of Trembling Bells songs which were played, heard here in what amounted to ‘unplugged’ arrangements. This served to further illustrate the lineage running from the Incredible String Band (whose own attempts to move towards a heavier rock sound tended to be tentative and unconvincing) to the Trembling Bells. The songs which they chose, Willows of Carbeth and I Took to You Like Christ to Wood, certainly have much of Williamson’s richness of imagery and language, although Alex Neilson’s writing tends more towards a wounded Romanticism blurred with booze, and a celebration of the particularity of place (triangulating the personal sacred territory between Yorkshire, Carbeth and Oxford).

Heron introduced the band as soon as he had the chance. His daughter Georgia Seddon sang accompanying vocals and played the keyboard, occasionally also adding a touch of percussion. Nick Prynn played the fiddle, and various other ‘little’ instruments. Whereas the ragbag jumble of folk and world instruments which coloured the Incredible String Band sound was largely replicated this evening by keyboard patches, Prynn brought some of the old spirit to bear on A Very Cellular Song. Its seamless evolutionary transformations between the different song ‘cells’ required him to drop kazoos, whistles and mandolins in order to pick up the violin which provided the interconnecting cell walls. The original sound of the bowed gimbri, which seemed to emulate the erratic buzzing flightpath of a bumble bee drunk on nectar, was replicated on the fiddle through technique alone. Simon Shaw’s bass anchored and wove its counterpoint throughout, slackened tuning providing what sounded like low brass accompaniment for one song.

A lot of Heron’s material was drawn from the Wee Tam and the Big Huge double LP from 1968. This was always the Incredible String Band record which most ably demonstrated the sheer range of their stylistic influences, and the wide diversity of their writing. Maya showed Williamson and Heron’s interest in both eastern music and spirituality. From Heron’s contributions, we also heard the Donovanesque folk-pop of You Get Brighter; the down home campfire country of Log Cabin Home in the Sky; the non-conformist hymnal in Air, a beautiful duet between Heron and Seddon; the American spiritual in Greatest Friend; and the mystical ballad Douglas Traherne Harding, in which Heron takes a few steps into Williamson’s territory of esoteric spirituality. Heron’s self-deprecating humour came to the fore once more in his dismissal of the Be Glad For the Song Has No Ending film the ISB made in 1971 as typical incomprehensible hippy whimsy. But the instrumental passage from the credit outro, complete with the opportunity for a joyful group chant-along, sounded great, and was combined with a song from Heron’s first solo LP Smiling Men With Bad Reputations (which Neilson has written about in the special Shindig magazine volume on the Incredible String Band and psychedelic folk).

Lavinia Blackwall and Alex Neilson finished the first half with a beautifully harmonised acappella rendition of 7 Years a Teardrop, which originally concluded their debut LP Carbeth. There was more a capella singing, featuring Heron, Seddon and the whole band, on the hymn-like Sleepers Awake (originally on the 1969 LP Changing Horses), which was always a favourite of mine and sounded great on this evening. Little was heard from the ISB’s later years, which was a shame in a way, since Heron wrote some fine songs in this under-appreciated period, particularly on the Liquid Acrobat as Regards the Air LP. Worlds They Rise and Fall, Red Hair or Painted Chariot from that album would all have been good to hear – ones for future collaborations, perhaps. We did hear Heron’s paean to the sanctity of the instant, This Moment, from the 1970 LP I Looked Up. And they all harked back to their first collaboration together in 2010 on Feast of Stephen, originally on Heron’s 1971 solo LP Smiling Men With Bad Reputations. A welcome reminder of winter’s chill on a humid, sultry night, it ended with one of Heron’s irresistible poppy choruses, fa-la-la-ing to fade.

A Very Cellular Song ended the evening on another hymnlike, singalong finale, its repetitive chorus the perfect send-off, blessing us with the lines ‘may the long time sun shine upon you/All love surround you/And the pure light within you/Guide you all the way on. Of course, standard gig form dictated that, appropriate as these would have been as parting sentiments, there was an encore to follow. Heron and Seddon sang an intimate and spellbinding a cappella number, after which the group returned for a cheerful rendition of the one song of the evening drawn from the 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion LP. This was the Hedgehog’s Song, one of Heron’s childlike song’s which look at the world through the eyes of small, anthropomorphised creatures (as in the Amoeba Song section of A Very Cellular Song, and Cousin Caterpillar). It was a good one on which to finish. No one can possibly be unhappy after hearing it, and we all left with a smile on our lips and another of Heron’s infectious choruses circling our minds.

Broadcast in Shindig Magazine

The cover of the latest edition of the music magazine Shindig, whose tastes generally tend towards 60s psychedelia, is this month graced by a photo of Trish and James from Broadcast, circa Tender Buttons, looking appraisingly down at the camera eye, a painted wall of words forming a cryptically semi-legible backdrop. It’s the first step in locating the band within a broader history, allying them with a continuing stream of adventurous music which seeks to marry pop melodicism with avant garde and experimental sounds and techniques and poetic lyrics. Psychedelia, if you will, although the retro connotations of the term ill suits the music which Broadcast made, which, whilst drawing on many influences from the past, was always resolutely forward looking. Small side pieces folded into the main article pinpoint some of the music which fed into Broadcast’s evolving sound – The United States of America above all. There’s also a short article on the 1969 White Noise LP An Electric Storm, a collaborative effort bringing together Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson from the Radiophonic Workshop with the young American musician David Vorhaus. Another big inspiration for Trish and James, it was, as she observed in Broadcast’s Invisible Jukebox article in the September 2005 edition of Wire magazine, slightly marred by the intrusion of ‘orgy vocals’. There’s an obvious element of sadness in the implication inherent in appearing in a magazine devoted to the glories of bygone days that the band are now a part of the history upon which they drew. Trish’s death at the beginning 2011 effectively brought the ever-evolving musical adventures she and James had shared, together with their fellow travellers, to an end. But in the interview which is the centrepiece of the issue, James reiterates the promise of material recorded for the album intended as a follow up to Tender Buttons (a full-force Broadcast album as opposed to the fruitful collaboration with Julian House’s Focus Group on the Witch Cults of the Radio Age LP) being forthcoming at some future date, when he is entirely satisfied that it has reached a suitably finely tuned state to stand as the fitting tribute which it will inevitably partly be viewed as. The article is titled The Children of Alice, which also points to a continuation of the lineage: James has been recording and will be performing under that fitting name in a trio which includes longtime friend Julian House, alias The Focus Group, and Roj Stevens, a former Broadcast compadre who has more recently recorded an excellent album on the Ghost Box label (its percussive and slightly abrasive electronic palette sounding like it wouldn’t have been out of place on Tender Buttons, or indeed on the faux library music of the Microtronics mini-cds). The choice of name references Trish’s love of Lewis Carroll and Jonathan Miller’s 1966 version of Alice in Wonderland, and its suggestion of continuation, rather than a new start with a new individual perspective, is hugely heartening. If Trish is the girl who left Chelmsley Wood to go down the rabbit hole, then it seems that the spirit of her brave explorations into the hidden continents of the imagination is to be honoured, and further expeditions mounted. The Children of Alice will release their first recordings as part of the Devon Folklore Tapes series on June 1st, and will be performing at the Deerhunter/Atlas Sound ATP festival in Camber Sands in June (and you can see a clip of Trish singing with Bradford Cox during an American tour over here).



In one of several capsule side pieces bracketing the main article, Dan Abbott offers a ten best of Broadcast list. James and Trish’s methodical approach to recording and perfectionist attention to detail means that any such list is bound to be highly subjective. The time and care taken to craft each song on each album means that their records were few and far between but uniformly strong. There could be any number of top ten combinations. Abbott chooses a representative selection, reflecting the different phases of the band’s development, and the various aspects of their sound and songwriting. Clearly a committed fan with a broad and deep knowledge of their oeuvre, his choices tend to direct us away from the obvious, but always with a colourful and frequently poetic description which imagistically summarises why he considers it essential. How can you not immediately want to hear a piece whose ‘notes hang suspended like stars glimpsed through gaps in a magic fog as it slowly engulfs an unsuspecting night-time city’. Wonderful stuff, and entirely apt for the track in question (and I’m not going to tell you which one it is, either – you’ll have to guess, or buy the magazine). I’m happy that he’s chosen Arc of a Journey, one of my favourites from the Tender Buttons LP. It’s one of Trish’s most evocatively allusive lyrics, summing up science fiction landscapes with a few carefully chosen phrases, the simple, yearning melody backed by atmospheric and refreshingly non-generic electronic sounds which suggest they’ve learned something from their collaboration with the BEAST (the Birmingham Electro Acoustic Sound Theatre) on the Pendulum EP.



Lists by their very nature invite response and suggested additions, however. So, if you insist: Book Lovers was my introduction to the band, and its shifting minor key arpeggio, suggestive of the 60s harpsichord sound which managed both to have a flavour of the antique and to inhabit the kinetic bustle of the present, drives it on irresistibly. The lyrics, full of bibliophile sensuality and excitement at book learning, are a statement of intent, with an unapologetic ‘it’s not for everyone’ pointing to their determination to pursue their own winding and idiosyncratic path. The melancholic instrumental addendum is gorgeous, a long drawn out sigh, both satisfied and a little sad, marking the closing of the storybook. Echo’s Answer follows the literary trail, with lyrics quoting Tennyson’s Echo’s Answer, as used in Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. Its languorous pace is typical of a number of Trish’s daydream songs. Illumination from the Extended Play Two EP has a quietly ecstatic feel, with a rich mix of electronic sound textures over propulsive bass (which has an echoing concrete shadow throughout) and a gently rolling swell of drums giving it an epic, orchestral sound. It’s the baroque frame supporting a beautiful folkish melody, with visionary lyrics of great power (‘wait, the growing stem of time/waits poisonous outside’ is a striking opening couplet) expressing the autonomy of inner worlds, and a chorus of soaring wordless vocals. Poem of Dead Song, also from the Extended Play Two EP (both are collected on the Future Crayon compilation of EPs) has another lusciously melancholic opening section, beginning this time with wordless vocals. With the soft, bell-chords of the synths sounding behind her, the strike of the initial chime burnished away to leave only glinting resonance, it sounds like Trish singing to herself whilst walking back home along silent night streets. An abrupt shift in tempo and key takes us into what is not so much a chorus as a different plane of the song, refracting against the initial passage at a subtly off-kilter angle. Words come to the fore, although the muffled vocalisations continue with a crooning harmonisation in the distance. A solemn invocation calls on transformative powers, offering a hopeful vision of a clear path ahead.



Valerie, from the HaHa Sound LP, is essential, a perfect setting of Lubos Fiser’s main theme from Jaromil Jires’ 1970 Czech surrealist fairy tale film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. The film became intensely personal to Trish, as she reveals in her sleeve note to the soundtrack album, released a few years back on the Finders Keepers label, and now happily repressed on vinyl with the original green poster design replacing the bloodstained daisy on the cover. It was a work of art to which she immediately felt instinctively attuned. It suffused her psyche so comprehensively (‘I became Valerie’, she notes of the experience of listening repeatedly to Fiser’s music) that such an appropriation seems entirely natural, the melody and lyrics a deeply affecting reflection of her inner life, as expressed by her sense of connection with the images on the screen. Hawk, which ends the album, flies along on a steady, ratcheting wooden pulse, two notes tic-toccing along at a nimble pace. Sparse synth arabesques are plucked out in reverberant harpsichord tones at regular intervals. Trish sings in a low register, the melody restrained in its emotional range. The words, intoned as much as sung, are imbued with a mythic feel. There’s the sense of a steady flight through the upper air, looking down on an ancient tundral landscape, progress measured out in the rushing beat of a strong and wide wingspan. The song sounds like a precursor to the ‘what you want is not what you need’ one chord Mongolian lute kosmische freak out with which Broadcast would end their concerts in the post-Tender Buttons period.



Tender Buttons, the title track of the LP which James and Trish made as a duo, draws on the linguistic play of Gertrude Stein, and finds Trish delighting in alliterative connection and the assonant qualities of words, creating striking contrasts or surprising associations through semi-random conjunctions of sound and meaning. The slithering, fast-picked guitar spattered over the firm supporting frame of the looping bassline sounds like Lou Reed in the early Velvet Underground days, or a stuttering passage in a Sonny Sharrock solo, a preface to the eruption. Black Cat, always a concert favourite, returns us to Alice’s subterranean or beyond-the-mirror dreamworlds. The repeated refrain ‘curiouser and curiouser’ is given its own distinctive inflection, the emphasis laid on the last two syllables. The electronic backing has a fizzing, roughly burred edge, which makes it sound as if it’s going to combust into smoking flame at any moment. This provides an added sense of tension, contrasting effectively with the measured vocals. The Focus Group collaboration Witch Cults of the Radio Age is a collage of song and sound fragments, which makes individual tracks harder to isolate and highlight. I See, So I See So, with its incantatory worlds and vocals, always stuck in my mind, though. The ‘solar on the rise’ lyric reminds me of Kenneth Anger’s films (as did the short films which accompanied the album), with Trish as a dark-haired incarnation of Marianne Faithfull in Lucifer Rising. It seems designed to sung on the rounded crest of an iron age burial mound or hill fort to mark some significant winter conjunction (in ‘magic January’). Finally, In Here the World Begins, from the Mother Is the Milky Way tour cd, is another low-key Pagan hymn, with lyrics of meditative self-reflexivity (‘a dream within a dream’) which fold in upon themselves before expanding outwards once more. The synths here sound like some plucked zither reverberating in a watery cavern. It was punctuated on stage by the most luminous synth lines from James, glowing with summery solar warmth. Trish would step lightly up and down the stage in front of a spotlit and back-projected screen, her shadowed form growing huge and then diminishing again as she did so. It’s a blissful and utterly entrancing lullaby, with all the acceptance of paradox and mystery often found in children’s songs (as in ‘life is but a dream’, cheerfully chorused in nurseries and libraries across the land as the concluding sentiment of Row, Row, Row Your Boat). Well, those are some of my favourites. Others will assemble a completely different set. All are equally valid.



Julian House is an abiding presence throughout the magazine. In his guise as a graphic designer with a distinctive, instantly recognisable style, he has produced to double page title spreads: One for the Broadcast article, featuring collaged fragments of Trish’s publicity and cover photo portraits, some outline cut-outs, some cropped and squared off; the other for an article on the dubious pleasures of 70s Italian giallo films, an imaginary poster in the period style of the one he designed for Peter Strickland’s recent film Berberian Sound Studio (and there’s an article on Broadcast’s soundtrack for this, too). Getting into the profundo rosso spirit of things, its steeped in shades of deep red. House is also interviewed in his role as joint chairman of the Ghost Box parish council, along with Jim Jupp (aka Belbury Poly, or the vicar of Belbury). Once more, he voices his indifference to the cultural pontifications filed under the unwieldy theoretical heading of hauntology. The Focus Group’s forthcoming LP, The Electrick Karousel, is previewed, apparently offering us numerous nuggets of ‘baroque psych’. It also features the magic trio of House, Roj and James on several tracks. The children of Alice are coming out into the world in many different guises.



As if all this weren’t enough, there’s also an article by Trembling Bells’ head Alex Nielson (a regular contributor of accessible and insightful reviews to the Wire), who shines a light on the post-Incredible String Band LPs of Mike Heron. I remember his Smiling Me With Bad Reputations album with vague fondness (sadly, it fell victim to one of my periodic Record and Tape Exchange purges many moons ago). My teen self particularly enjoyed the track with Pete Townshend and Keith Moon, glorying under the Beefheartian title Warm Heart Pastry. It seemed a surprising change of direction, before you recalled the move towards a heavier rock sound on the latter and little-loved Incredible String Band LPs. A news item at the beginning of the magazine has alerted me to the fact that Trembling Bells are returning to the Exeter Phoenix on 20th July. After their previous visit with Bonnie Prince Billy, they are teaming up on this occasion with the aforementioned Mr Heron, together with his daughter Georgia Seddon.

Night Ferry (1976)

Another article surveys the modest pleasures afforded by the Children’s Film Foundation from the 50s through to the 70s, which have grown in charm with the passing of time (I can’t say I ever saw one while I was actually a child). They now offer an insight into a more innocent world, which seems separated by a gulf greater than the few intervening decades would suggest. Watch the London Tales collection released by the bfi (it’s in the Devon library system if you’re from these parts), and in particular the widely roaming attempts of three schoolchildren to set up their own rag and bone round in The Salvage Gang, and you’ll see a city which simply no longer exists (and you’ll find yourself straining to pick up background detail passing by during the children’s trip on the top deck of a routemaster – a modern variant on the turn of the century ‘phantom rides’). Night Ferry (1976) is also fascinating, with its young punk protagonists in unglamorous back street settings in south west London reflecting their time and place with an unforced realism rather undermined by the preposterous (but fun) Egyptian mummy heist plot. The opening scene, in which one tyke tries to evade apprehension having trespassed into a busy railway marshalling yard to retrieve his toy glider, is particularly hair-raising. It has all the cringing tension of a public information film, with a shockingly violent accident just waiting to happen. The boy is seen hopping out of the way of oncoming trucks, and running in the narrow space between a stationary line of wagons and another approaching train. It’s inconceivable that such scenes would be filmed today, even if marshalling yards still existed. More treats for trainspotters (sorry, rail enthusiasts) come in the form of extensive footage, both in platform and onboard, of the night sleeper service from Victoria to (via Sealink) Paris and Brussells, just a short while before it was scrapped. I look forward to the release of the Weird Adventures CFF collection forthcoming from the bfi, which includes Powell and Pressburger’s 1972 swansong, The Boy Who Turned Yellow.

All in all, this edition of Shindig seems to be especially constructed to meet the needs of the average Broadcast fan, and thus can be considered essential.

Trembling Bells, Bonnie Prince Billy and Muldoon's Picnic at the Exeter Phoenix

Trembling Bells and Bonnie Prince Billy played at the Exeter Phoenix on the last day of April (Beltane night), showcasing the songs from their recent collaborative LP The Marble Downs. It’s a wholly successful meeting of the harsh romance of the backstreets of Glasgow with the shadowy and remote backwoods of Kentucky, the British folk roots upon which Trembling Bells build their foundations combining with its transmuted Transatlantic forms. This is an album which essentially involves the king (or prince) of dark and twisted American folk taking over from frontman (although on stage he's generally to be found sitting unassumingly at the back behind his drumkit) Alex Neilson in providing vocal counterpoint to the pure and soaring soprano of Lavinia Blackwell. Neilson writes most of the material on the new album, seemingly tailoring many of the songs to fit Billy’s stage persona (a separate entity from Will Oldham, the real person behind it), although this may simply be the result of a happy confluence of thematic interests, two similar souls finding common ground in unwholesome preoccupations. These are songs full of bitterness at love left bleeding, desperate and occasionally pathetic longing, drunken self-pity, suicide attempts, cynical disavowals of the possibility of true romance, biblical allusions (all Old Testament, of course), with occasional hints of incipient murderous psychosis. The booklet art by Lucy Stein also seems designed to fit in with the Bonnie Prince’s upfront, frequently twisted and decidedly grubby sexuality. It’s roughly sketched imagery, seemingly scrawled directly from the uninhibited subconscious, is along way from Lavinia Blackwell’s illustrations for the booklet of the first Trembling Bells LP Carbeth, which drew on details from William Blake’s illustrated books. Her cover for the new album looks like a woodcut or lino print depicting a Samuel Palmer Shoreham-like village all aglow in the rising or setting sun. In the inside sleeve, the Trembling Bells quartet stand in front of a church, looking on rather nervously as Billy crouches down in front of them, his arms stretched before him as if he is about to begin an incantation, or attempt an act of magical levitation.

Before Trembling Bells took to the stage, the support group Muldoon’s Picnic performed an excellent 30 minute set. Who is or was Muldoon, I wondered, and where did he like to lay out his picnic. All was made clear on the group’s website, which informs us that it was a 19th century Irish American music hall act popular in New York. So popular, in fact, that the phrase Muldoon’s picnic found its way into common parlance, with reference to any wild coming together of vaguely roguish or disreputable sorts. Muldoon’s Picnic are an a capella group who sing a variety of mainly traditional tunes. On this night they were present in the slightly diminished form of Harry Campbell and Katy Cooper, fine Yorkshire folk both, if my ear for an accent is accurate. They were joined on stage by Alex and Lavinia from Trembling Bells, and also by Bonnie Prince Billy for one number. Their songs covered a wide geographic range within the British Isles, beginning with a paean of praise to the homelands of Yorkshire, travelling north to Glasgow, and then back down south to Oxford and Sussex. There were a number of configurations on stage, with various people disappearing into the shadows and reappearing again later. The initial quartet split to give Alex a solo turn, with Campbell and Cooper also singing a few duets. They usually mix material from around the world and throughout history (as you can hear at their Myspace site), from Breton and East European songs to medieval ballads, Sacred Harp hymns, shanties and French Canadian rounds. But tonight, in their depleted state, and perhaps in honour of the coming May Day, and playing to the strengths of their guest members, they confined themselves to British songs. Although Lavinia would have been more than comfortable with early music, an area which she has studied in depth.

Bells and Muldoons

Several pieces bore the signature style of Alex Neilson’s pen, being scattered with literary and artistic allusions, and shot through with his customary fatalistic romanticism. Some of the songs had appeared on the recent Duchess EP, which featured the coming together of the Trembling Bells and Muldoon’s Picnic factions on the second side. There’s Nothing Nobler than Yorkshire, with its percussive foot stomp after the first line emphasising the sentiment, in October is a proud evocation of the autumn atmospheres of the county, providing a poetic cartography in the form of a litany of locales, from ‘Hull to Applethwaite’, taking in the ‘mighty Humber’ and the Bay of Scarborough. From Hale to the Pearly Gates, it locates the sacred in its dales and along its coastline. Bells of Oxford, which cheekily dares to begin with a moon/June rhyme, summons up Edenic days, marked in true folk refrain fashion by ‘the sound of the bells of Oxford-o’, before lamenting their loss. Reference is made to Jane Morris, married to William Morris and pined after by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; the pre-Raphaelite muse who was ‘the midwife to a million brushstrokes’. Tuning Fork of the Earth was a sensuously Pagan hymn, full of lusty mysticism, finding the spirit of the land within one particular body. Tincture of Tears takes us to Sussex, and is a bittersweet meditation on beauty, which is ‘always tempered by the fingerprint of pain’. The nightingale is ‘choking on a worm’, and the singer looks out on the Sussex landscape, ‘a poem froze in clay’, and feels as if he’s ‘enacting all those Copper songs, as in some ancient play’. Sculptor, stone carver and advocate of communal dwelling and free love Eric Gill got a mention in there somewhere, too, probably in the context of his Ditchling community in East Sussex. In a song I’d not heard before. The experimental film-maker Maya Deren, a heroine of mine, got her own featured refrain in the impressionistic, Glasgow-set The Day That Maya Deren Died (probably not the actually title of the song, but that was the repeated chorus line), sung solo by Alex. The songs were delivered with great conviction and passion, voices joining in radiant and sonorous harmonies, often of an unusual and striking pitch, whilst remaining entirely consonant and richly expressive. They brought to mind other a capella folk gatherings: The Copper Family, The Watersons, Swan Arcade and Coope, Boyes and Simpson. Indeed, they performed a spirited version of the celebratory Watersons song Bright Phoebus, a tribute to and acknowledgement of honourable antecedents. Blackwell and Neilson’s participation, and the ease with which Neilson’s songs fitted into the tradition, highlighted the extent to which folk music underpins the Trembling Bells sound. Later, they would apologise for not hanging around after the gig, as they were anxious to head down to Cornwall, so that they could witness the May Day celebrations in Padstow, with its famous hobby horse parading through the streets. Attempting to sum up the atmosphere, Lavinia said that everything goes ‘a bit skewiff’ – an English phrase which I’d not heard for a while, but will now reintroduce into my vocabulary. She also ribbed Alex about always having wanted to be a morris dancer. Evidently she hit a raw nerve, as he responded with a spluttered ‘ahh, shut up’. There’s nowt wrong wi’t, anyway. Morris dancing has become one of those easy comic targets, with an unspoken agreement that it is a national embarrassment. A recent BBC4 documentary by the Unthank sisters on English dancing customs and rituals hopefully went some way towards putting paid to that notion, however. You can get an idea of what the Muldoon/Bells axis sounded like from a session they recorded for Marc Riley’s Radio 6 show a short while back, over here.

Trembling Bells played the opening track from their new LP, I Made A Date With An Open Vein, early on. Its dramatic intro, with Lavinia Blackwell’s soprano steadily rising in a dramatic upward sweep, brought to my mind the wordless vocal passages in Carl Neilsen’s and Vaughan Williams’ Third Symphonies, both evoking expansive pastoral landscapes. Here it acts as an angelic prelude to Bonnie Prince Billy’s ascent into the heavenly kingdom, his character having killed himself (for love, of course). Any hint that he may have attained unlikely sainthood are immediately dashed, however, as, having found that is love is not there, he swiftly ‘bailed out of that gold fucking cloud’. In its blunt rejection of a celestial and incorporeal paradise, it’s an early indication that the concerns of the songs to be sung will be unapologetically earthbound and concerned with more palpable pleasures. Starting the song with the singing subject’s suicide also introduces what will be a recurring lyrical theme. It turns up again in Love Is A Velvet Noose ,with its opening lines ‘as I rode out on Valentine’s Day/All down to Beachy Head’ (Beachy Head being a high outcropping cliff on the south coast of Sussex notorious for attracting suicides). Another song is based on a poem by Dorothy Parker, who wrote her own darkly humorous meditation on the particular difficulties associated with different suicide methods, Might as Well Live. These suicide references, often in otherwise stirring songs, are an extreme expression of the strain of doomed romance which runs throughout Neilson’s writing. If not at the end of a rope, along the edge of a razor blade or from the foot of a cliff, the failure of the romantic ideal is often viewed through the wrong end of a cheap bottle of whisky. The boozy ballads of loss and longing are a reflection of Trembling Bells’ base in Glasgow, a city in which alcohol and a fierce romanticism have long been fierce bedfellows. In Ain’t Nothing Wrong With a Little Loving, Lavinia sings ‘I’ve longed for gin oblivion’, whilst the second line of Love Is A Velvet Noose finds our abject singer, approaching his end at Beachy Head, mournfully declaring ‘my liver felt like a suicide note to Johnnie Walker Red’. Billy also sings the unseasonal New Year’s Eve’s The Loneliest Night of the Year from the perspective of another heartbroken romantic whose been drinking ‘since September’, and Lavinia played some of her finest Chas (or is it Dave) barroom piano for the chirpy encore song of self-pitying alcoholism, You Are On the Bottom (and the Bottle’s On My Mind) – another of the blurry after hours numbers which often seem to round off Trembling Bells LPs.

Grace Slick and Marty Balin - this doesn't happen

I Made A Date With An Open Vein has Lavinia Blackwell, after her mesmerising introductory operatics, joining with the rest of the band in providing backing vocals and chorus responses behind Bonnie Prince Billy’s passionately delivered lead. Other songs, however, are structured around duets, with Billy and Lavinia taking on sparring, call and response roles, alternating fighting, pleading or cutting lines. Hearing Billy and Blackwell sing together and to each other recalls other duetting male and female vocalists: Marty Balin and Grace Slick in Jefferson Airplane; Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra; Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin; Sandy Denny and Ian Matthews in the early Fairport Convention; and Johnny Cash and June Carter. In performance, however, they inhabit different worlds, with none of the facing off and throwing back and forth of fragments of vocal lines which Marty and Grace shared in Jefferson Airplane’s pomp. Blackwell is too busy concentrating on her keyboard playing whilst simultaneously singing, and Billy becomes absorbed in private ecstasies. They make for an interestingly contrasting pair, both vocally and visually. Their voices provide a good counterpoint to each other, their distinct qualities balancing well. Bonnie Prince Billy’s emotive waver, with its country catch in the voice, is set against Lavinia’s classically clear soprano, with its controlled range and dynamics. Visually, Lavinia stands tall behind her electric piano/organ, fairly still and restrained throughout, and elegantly attired in a sixties style dress. Billy, meanwhile, maintains a determinedly anti-glamorous look, wearing an old t-shirt that’s evidently a size too small, a beany pushed back on his balding bonce, which is circled by a wild thicket of hair. His beard is at medium magnitude, not as bushy as it can be but still a fulsome growth. He sways and capers throughout, waving he arms about in spasmodic, crook-elbowed gestures which recall the throaty ecstasies of Joe Cocker, and tends to hold them behind his back at intervals, proudly thrusting out his rounded belly as if in a prominent display of his finest, most alluring feature. He generally plays the role of the lusty ape, the strutting primate to the hilt. There’s a definite element of humour to the Bonnie Prince persona, a consciousness on Will Oldham’s part of the inherent absurdity of such a character, which makes the potentially oppressively downbeat subject matter of many of the songs sung tonight somehow light and even amusing. Several of these songs find him pitted against the icy aloofness of Lavinia’s characters, and the duets generally trace the end of the affair, the recriminations in the wake of the break up. It has to be said, she’s probably better off without him. Blackwell provides a contradictory voice to counteract Billy’s self-absorption, highlighting his self-indulgences and undermining any tendency towards self-mythologisation. OLove is a Velvet Noose and the driving Ain’t Nothing Wrong With a Little Loving are both ‘argument’ songs, but the insult-based duets reach their peak on the number which brought the pre-encore performance to a rousing close, I Can Tell You’re Leaving. Here again, Blackwell’s voice was at its dramatic height on the introduction to the chorus, singing I Can Tell You’re Leaving with a thrilling, rising melismatic swell. Billy regains a little swagger after the maudlin emotional abjection and affection of disdain on previous duets, threatening that ‘like Merle Haggard, you’ll see the fighting side of me’. Not being familiar with Haggard’s work, I’m not sure what this alludes to. Maybe he’s confusing him with Marvin Hagler. In line with the sense of self-conscious absurdism and role-playing, there’s an element of auto-criticism in some of the lines which Blackwell sings. ‘You fetishize your grief’, she responds to Billy, and ‘you’re a prisoner in your own work’. This could be both Neilson making a wry comment on his own lyrical tendencies, or a little gentle poke at Bonnie Prince Billy’s reputation for eagerly embracing darkness.

The Duchess EP cover - sunset to The Marble Downs' sunrise

There were also songs where Billy and Lavinia alternated verses. This was particularly effective in the Dorothy Parker-based song Adventures in Assonance, for which Blackwell set her words to music. It’s not a poem which I can find in my copy of the Penguin Dorothy Parker. But it’s a lovely evocation of loneliness and isolation in which Paker bares the vulnerable soul which she protected behind a formidable and impenetrable shield of ascerbic wit. On other numbers, Billy takes to the fore, including howling out his own Riding, a raging tempest of a song in which he incestuously declares ‘I love my sister Lisa most of all’. Lavinia acts as an interrogatory voice, and then an admonitory, nagging shred of conscience (‘don’t you know that’s sinful boy’). All to no avail, of course. Billy is as intent as ever on his own damnation. Every Time I Close My Eyes (We’re Back There), on the other hand, appears to be a murder ballad, with Billy obeying the voice of Proverbs 31, reflecting that ‘the ultimate act of possession is homicidal love’, and living in tormented regret forever afterwards. Lavinia’s voice comes in as a ghostly reminder of heaven once more needlessly cast aside, Kylie to his Nick Cave. The darkness was temporarily dispersed by the hymnal Lord Bless Us All, a luscious lullaby written by Bee Gee Robin Gibb from his 1970 solo LP Robin’s Reign. ‘When you sleep, London streets are silent’, he wrote. ‘All the world is filled with song…Lord let all be blessed’. It is a blissful vision, and after the lyrical benediction, Lavinia’s soprano rises up to regions of wordless, transcendent praise, pushing up against but never quite breaking beyond the barriers of freeform wailing in a Patty Waters or Charalambides style. Sadly, they didn’t perform their version of Scott Walker’s Duchess, released on the recent EP, tonight. But they delved into the back catalogue for the encore and delivered a scorching Love Made An Outlaw of My Heart from the Abandoned Love LP, with Bonnie Prince Billy giving it his full, impassioned heart and soul, body wrenched with imploring gesticulations.

The band were fantastic. Alex Neilson’s ceaselessly inventive drumming really gives the music its structural base, allowing it to shift tempi with effortless and unforced ease, and hanging verses and choruses on unconventional metres without making it all seem contrived and prog-marched. This rhythmic fluidity gives the songs a multi-part, kaleidoscopic structure, always turning and realigning themselves. It lends them an epic quality, and a literary sense of offering differing perspectives. Lavinia stood behind her red keyboard, her playing veering between an electric piano sound and sweeping tides of swirling 60s organ. The former was effective for the group’s ballad side, and was particularly affecting in the slow arpeggios which backed the melancholic, yearning Excursions into Assonance. In the latter section of Every Time I Close My Eyes (We’re Back There), she played church organ-like cadences which seemed to soothe even the tormented soul of Billy. Ain’t Nothing Wrong With a Little Loving brought Trembling Bells’ 70s rock affiliations to the fore, and Lavinia provided streaming currents of organ chords along which the song glided. In Lord Bless Us All, the organ shimmered with a glorious radiance which ascended heavenwards with her voice. Of the bassist, Simon Shaw, I can’t say much, not having much of an ear for the instrument, but he certainly never faltered or placed a note or beat out of place. Mike Hastings’ guitar was sublime, with its characteristic vibrato shiver, reminiscent of the 60s Bay Area sound of John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane, as well as their modern incarnation, Michio Kurihara, guitarist with Japanese band Ghost and frequent collaborator with Damon and Naomi. Hastings played fluid patterns up and across the fretboard, fleet, mercurial and singing. His guitar could actually have done with being a little louder at some points. Perhaps it was considered that this was a night for the vocalists to take precedence. His slightly off pitch riffs and variations in Ain’t Nothing Wrong With a Little Longing tilted Lavinia’s organ chords at an oblique angle, making the onrushing intro seem thrillingly on the verge of spinning out of control. On Riding, he lashed out with a fiery descending riff from the upper register of the fretboard, which expressed the fevered state of Bonnie Prince Billy’s possessed soul in the song, giving a good impression of where he might be headed. In the encore he was given his moment in Love Made An Outlaw of My Heart to really let rip, scoring searing slide clusters beyond the edge of the fretboard which sparked off in a meteor shower of free jazz noise reminiscent of Sonny Sharrock at his most ecstatically abandoned. He’s definitely, along with Michio Kurihara, one of my favourite modern guitarists. Just as Trembling Bells are one of my favourite current bands – and happily they wholly lived up to expectations tonight. Hopefully they’ll return soon.

The Unthanks and Trembling Bells

The pairing of Trembling Bells and The Unthanks made for an exciting prospect. Both are inflected with traditional folk elements in their own different ways but have also absorbed a wide variety of other musical influences which they combine and refashion to create their own individual sound. I was clearly not the only one who had been eagerly anticipating this evening at the Phoenix Arts Centre in Exeter, as the main hall was packed to an uncomfortable degree, seemingly pushing at the very limits of its capacity. The close proximity of one’s fellow audience members made the usual irritations of the small contingent of beer bozos, ceaseless chatterers and folks who push through to take up a position two inches in front of your face all the more inescapable. The all-standing nature of the event was rather unfair on small people, too. The late running of the performances also meant that there was a mass exodus in the latter part of The Unthanks’ set. Nothing to do with the quality of the music (far from it), more with that of the local public transport, which has to be a consideration for concerts in rural areas. There are no such things as last tubes, night buses or early morning trains around here.

Trembling Bells

I put such quibbles out of my mind to enjoy Trembling Bells’ set (supportively introduced by Rachel Unthank), which ran at a disappointingly brief 30 minutes. Alex Neilson was unable to be present (the reason for his absence left to our imaginations), which left a major gap given his central role in the band as writer, singer and percussive driving force. His place was taken by his brother Alistair, so at least it was someone who bore some resemblance to him and was roughly the same size. Whilst maybe not having quite the same flair and inventiveness as his brother (and I’m sure there’s a bit of sibling rivalry there) he proved an adequate stand-in (or sit-in, in this case) on the drum stool. Alex’s absence shifted the focus to Lavinia Blackwall, and the awkwardness of her rather diffident between song manner aside, she proved more than adequate at fronting the band. Her pure, soaring vocal style was highlighted on songs old and new, with Carbeth, Adieu, England and When I Was Young particular highlights. Cold Heart of Mine and Goathland showed the two sides of their new LP The Constant Pageant, which veers between classic 70s and folk rock. Goathland referenced Robin’s Hood Bay, continuing Alex’s proud acknowledgement of his North Yorkshire roots and fitting in well with the North Eastern cast of the evening. Mike Hastings’ guitar comes further to the fore on the new LP, and his playing was superb throughout. He’s got something of a West Coast sound, with a touch of the shimmering vibrato of Quicksilver Messenger Service’s John Cippollina and some of the tremulous quaver of Neil Young in electric mode. On Love Made An Outlaw of my Heart, he unleashed a squall of cascading noise with the aid of a bottle neck slide. It’s perhaps an indication of the kind of music he plays in the context of his looser, improvisational band with Lavinia, The Pendulums. It’s a brief, thrilling explosion of noise reminiscent of the style of free jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock, or of the formless noise maelstroms of Sonic Youth or Yo La Tengo. For a moment, I thought Lavinia might ram a drumstick behind her strings and join in with a bit of savage detuning. But it was neither the time nor the place for that sort of thing.

The Unthanks are sisters Rachel and Becky, but they are also an accomplished and versatile chamber group comprising a string quartet, trumpet, piano, guitar, bass and drums, with various additional small instruments to add colour. The two chaps on the right of the stage quietly and unfussily impressed with their frequent exchange of instrumental duties, taking turns behind the drums (with Alistair Neilson sitting in as a guest on a couple of songs) and on bass and guitar (and ukulele). The sisters’ subtly contrasting voices are at the heart of the music. Becky’s is shaded with a slight burr of huskiness, Rachel’s even-toned and smooth. Both are steeped in the vowel sounds and accents of Northumberland in the far North East of England. When they combine in close harmony, occasionally parting or coming together with surprising intervals, they can instantly pierce the heart or make the spirit soar. They perform one song learned from a local family friend a cappella, and the effect is absolutely spellbinding. The tenor of the songs tends towards the melancholic and minor-key, with a hushed and slow-moving character. ‘Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more depressing’, they self-consciously quipped after a particularly dark song. The apogee of this tendency came with Close the Coalhouse Door, the inevitable mining disaster song, which gained power by evoking a generalised, mythic atmosphere of death and mourning rather than focussing on a specific event. Give Away Your Heart, written by singer-songwriter Jon Redfern in the aftermath of the Iraq war, is also symptomatic, with its chorus of ‘disappointment is everywhere’ repeated in incantatory style. There’s a general sense of sadness at and unease with the modern world, and given the generally introverted nature of the new material, it’s a testament to the power of both Unthank voices and of the beautiful and musically diverse arrangements that they are able to captivate and mesmerise the large audience, inducing a stilled collective holding of the breath. Despite the downbeat lyrical content (and this is essentially folk music, after all) the sisters’ presence is comforting, and you feel entirely at ease in their company. The Unthanks used to bear the rather less egalitarian name Rachel Unthank and the Winterset, and there is indeed something wintry about their repertoire. It’s music for singing around a blazing hearth, with a warming pint of ale close at hand. It recognises the dark and cold beyond the flickering circle of domestic light, but holds it at bay through that mutual recognition and the feeling of closeness and companionship which it creates. The sisters mention their residential singing weekends, which sound very welcoming and a fine chance for those interested in traditional song to partake of this atmosphere.

Becky and Rachel occasionally move off-mike for a brief, huddled consultation, evincing an easeful sisterly rapport. They sometimes sway gently in unison to the rhythmic swell of the music, and Rachel can be seen to lay a cradling hand on the rise of her 7 month-pregnant belly from time to time. Becky lets us know that her sister has been banned from doing any clog-dancing, and so she takes a solo spot for these traditional interludes, to instant audience applause. Again, the packed standing crowd meant that this was an auditory rather than visual experience for most. But the heavy percussive clack and clop of the heels added a stirring and forceful drive to the propulsive swing of the music.

From their new LP Last, Queen of Hearts sounded like a haunted music-box waltz, with a chiming melody plucked out what could have been a celeste or a thumb piano. Last had a lilting, lulling piano figure which suggested the steady unchanging progress of the hours in a song evocative of loneliness and drift. Gan to the Kye was a dreamlike song shrouded in North Eastern dialect, which the sisters refrained from clarifying, suggesting we were probably familiar with it by now, leaving me completely in the dark as a result. They said that they had a few kye in residence outside their window, which hinted that they might be referring to a local variant of the fairy folk. Familiar songs from Here’s The Tender Coming included Sad February and Lucky Gilchrist, whose arrangements bore the imprint of minimalist composers John Adams (his piano pieces China and Phrygian Gates) and Steve Reich (with small group chamber and vocal pieces such as Octet and Tehillim). Lucky Gilchrist was also reminiscent at times of the arrangements on some Sufjan Stevens songs. There was an intriguing selection of covers, which served to triangulate the broad span of their interests and influences. Tom Waits’ No One Knows I’m Gone is one of his beat laments, weary romanticism from the perspective of the gutter. Robert Wyatt’s Cuckoo Madame was his resonant song of resignation from the Cuckooland LP, written with his partner Alfie Benge, allusively addressing the displacement caused by war and surrogate motherhood. The sisters traced the contours of its delicate, idiosyncratic melody, separately singing verses in turn, with space for some instrumental passages in between. It was interesting to see how they adapted these songs, whose authors have such distinctive voices, to their own style. Most surprisingly, King Crimson’s Starless, from their 1974 LP Red (probably their finest) fitted perfectly into the mood of their ballad-based repertoire, providing a fitting successor to Robert Wyatt’s Sea Song, which worked so beautifully on the second Winterset album The Bairns. Lizzie Jones’ trumpet (superb throughout the evening) plangently recreated Robert Fripp’s mournfully singing, reverberant guitar motif which gives the song its heart in the original version, with the string section here replacing the fairground pipe-organ wheeze of the mellotron. The strings even provide a quartet arrangement of the central instrumental passage from the King Crimson LP, based around one of Fripp’s looping angular and dissonant riffs. The group fail to break out into a Crimson-style freeform noise improv freak out, however. This was neither the time nor the place for that sort of thing.

Starless was offered as a final surprise to end the show (and this is the advantage of being present at the first concert in a tour). They returned without delay for an encore, and bade farewell in appropriate fashion with a couple of old favourites from the Winterset days, Fareweel Regality and Blackbird, which sent us out with a warm smile which found itself reflected in the hints of imminent spring wafting through the balmy night air.

Trembling Bells in Exeter

I went to see Trembling Bells on Sunday at the Phoenix Arts Centre in Exeter. On arriving, I found out, through asking at the box office counter, that the starting time had been shifted to 9, although the schedule on the noticeboard still said 8. The notice also still located it in what is known as the Voodoo Lounge, an attempt to lend an air of exoticism to what seems like an old schoolroom upstairs (the building used to be part of the university). Having returned nearer the time, we found this to be completely empty, and obviously not set up for anything. Asking where they were in fact playing, I was told, in a manner which suggested I was a bit of an idiot, that it was, of course, on the main stage. Pardon me for not being tuned in to the psychic frequency on which such announcements were clearly being announced. The main hall was supposed to be housing the milling throng who’d come to see the guitar stylings of ‘blues-rock legend’ , Tommy Castro, but he was nowhere to be found. Not quite legendary enough, it would seem, or perhaps it was the result of the complete lack of any advertising (although volcanic ash may also have played its part, of course. The lackadaisical ‘yeah, whatever’ atmosphere of amateurishness which the Arts Centre exudes perhaps explains the poor turnout for this concert. Trembling Bells have, after all, received a great deal of good press, and have been championed by the likes of Joe Boyd, Paul Weller, and Stuart Maconie on his radio 6 programme The Freak Zone, and Exeter is an area in which music which has a folk element generally attracts a good crowd. The Sunday evening factor may also have played its part, but more people should have been here, particularly as it was such a great gig.

The atmosphere did indeed have something of a Sunday evening air, the weekend already packed away and people’s minds half focussed on Monday morning. This may have explained the general hushed quietude which gave the between song interludes a slight sense of awkwardness. You might not have been able to hear a pin drop, but you could certainly hear a harmonica being fitted into its holder with a preternaturally loud series of exaggerated clunks. Singer Lavinia Blackwall seemed diffident and apologetically awkward in her introductions, and was occasionally helped along by fellow vocalist Alex Neilson’s amusingly offhand comments from behind his drumkit (he refrained from providing his own rimshots). I liked his reference to a large, barren area of featureless scrubland north of Yorkshire – Scotland. He’s allowed to say this, since they all live just north of Glasgow and are therefore adopted natives.

The band is generally filed under the heading folk rock, which doesn’t necessarily do them any favours. It’s a collision of styles which has produced occasionally sublime but often cumbersome and timelocked music. They’re a disparate bunch, whose take on folk is informed by the divergent musical genres in which they’re versed. The fact that they’re approaching the music from the perspective of interested outsiders means that this is third or fourth generation music, with no interest in the preservation of any notional idea of the purity of its sources. The folk elements of the songs, most of which are written by Alex Neilson, provide a backdrop of English romanticism on which to project tales of love, loss and yearning, and which lends them a real sense of place and seasonal atmosphere. The lyrics are romantic in the poetic sense, full of an evident love of language (and with the odd literary reference thrown in, such as the Dylan Thomas referencing ‘rage against the dying of the light’ chorus to When I Was Young), with Neilson in particular clearly enjoying the sound of particular words, which he rolls his voice around with emphatically articulated relish. It could be said that the 70s rock elements in the music are in fact as traditionally English as the folk aspect, so completely have they become part of the universally shared subconscious soundtrack to the era.

Trembling Bells - Live at the Vortex, London from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.<

Lavinia Blackwall, a tall woman, comes from a background in early and medieval music, which she studied for an MA, and has a soaring, pure-toned voice which would be equally at home in the classical recital hall. She stood out front behind her keyboard, although she generally favoured a hollow-bodied electric guitar on which she played ragged rhythm chords. She also accompanied her singing on one song with a celeste, handily contained in its own pastel blue carrying case. Alex Neilson, a fairly small man, stood out front to sing with Lavinia on the first number before retreating to his drum kit, where he joined that small coterie of vocalist drummers in the company of Karen Carpenter and, perhaps more appropriately, Levon Helm of The Band. He comes from a free jazz improvising background, and his drumming progresses in loose, shifting patterns which gives the music a feel of relaxed fluidity, avoiding the sometimes clodhopping rhythms of the 70s folk rock of yore. These songs sprawl, and feel like they could stretch out to Grateful Dead length if allowed, although perhaps fortunately, the band don’t allow themselves to lapse into such self indulgence. His drumming is visually interesting, too, as he sometimes raises his left arm and holds the stick, elbow bent, poised behind his head, as if taking part in some ritualistic form of Japanese percussion. He also adopts the usual panoply of dextrous stick twirls, although didn’t attempt any of the more advanced tossing the stick in the air and catching it moves.

His singing is an unaffectedly gruff yet quite light counterpoint to the crystal clarity of Lavinia Blackwall. Alone, it might prove insufficient to carry the weight of the songs, but in duet, it adds to the perfect blend of elements which create such a fine complimentary balance. He adds the odd enthusiastic yelp at appropriate moments, which vocalises the music’s joyful propulsion. Bassist Simon Shaw (a medium sized man) locked into the rhythm section faultlessly and provided the odd bit of backing vocal. The guitarist Mike Hastings, a big man (why am I so obsessed with their sizes? Perhaps my subconscious is trying to emphasize the disparate nature of the individuals which make up the band, the different qualities which they bring to it) really comes into his own live. His playing is given much more prominence, as he has to fill the gap left by the absence of the sounds of brass bands, crumhorns, recorders and harps which fill the records. He lead guitar, with the subtle addition of effects, has a liquid fluency, with forceful attack when required (he can rock out, in other words). Thankfully, he avoids the blues-based clichés which tended to provide the rock element of folk rock in the 70s, and marred records by the likes of Trees. His flowing guitar, with its blurred slides and swift flurries of notes reminded me of the free jazz player Sonny Sharrock, with hints too of West Coast psych bands. Oddly, I was also reminded, in more of an associative way, of XTC guitarist Dave Gregory, particularly his solo on That’s Really Super, Super Girl from the Skylarking LP. That’s probably just me, though. You can get an idea of Hastings’ playing from the track Love Made an Outlaw of My Heart from the new LP Abandoned Love. He also played a bit of mournful harmonica, to add a bit of extra, plangent shading.

They played a few tracks from Carbeth, one of my favourite LPs of last year, including When I Was Young, with its impassioned chorus, and to my delight, Willows of Carbeth, which is one of their most successful amalgams of folk and rock, and which Lavinia sings with real force. No Garlands of Stars, unfortunately, but you can’t have everything. There was plenty from the new record, which occasioned wry comments about the delight with which audiences tended to greet the announcement ‘we’re going to be playing mostly new stuff tonight’. Adieu England was one of the more folky tracks, and was preceded by patriotic assertions of the beauty of Yorkshire. Other numbers, such as Baby Lay Down Your Burden (which Alex claimed was written just so that they could have a song with the word ‘baby’ in the chorus) and Love Made an Outlaw of my Heart, suggest that they are quite happy to expunge the folk element of the folk-rock formula. As previously suggested, these had as much of a traditionalist air as the folkier songs. There was no September is the Month of Death, a gorgeous song from the new album, but perhaps it would be too difficult to reproduce its atmosphere, with its medieval instrumentation and double tracked vocals, live. The small crowd enthusiastically applauded for an encore, and Lavinia came back alone to back herself on guitar for a melancholy song of lost love whose chorus sung of feeling like Monday, appropriately enough for Sunday evening. Alex was enticed back, despite complaining of a sore throat, for a final a cappella rendition of Seven Years A Teardrop, the closing track from Carbeth, during which he bent the end of his vocal lines up to meet and harmonize with Lavinia. It brought a fine concert to a quiet but rousing finish.