concert

Review: Oysterband / June Tabor, Bristol Beacon – ‘A hell of a goodbye”

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photo Matt Congdon

It’s a magical last show from the band that are taking a long, long time to retire

By Gavin McNamara

After 45 years of touring, folk-rockers Oysterband have decided that the time is right to retire. They are, of course, taking a long, long time to say goodbye with a huge tour that spills well into 2025 – and they’re bringing along a special guest too.

The three albums that they have made with June Tabor are absolute cult classics, Tabor adding her depth, her gravitas, her subtleties to a band always best experienced live.

And so it is this evening, on a night of saying goodbye to Oysterband, June Tabor steals the show.

As soon as she steps, haltingly, on to the stage, Tabor is the focal point. On Mississippi Summer the harsh, dust choked fields are evoked with ease, Tabor exuding desperation and defiance as Ian Telfer’s fiddle flickers around her.

That fiddle seems to course through Tabor, sending jolts of energy into her frame: she grows as it plays, becoming an utterly commanding presence. It is, as she says, “one hell of a song”.

There are times when she spits out lyrics, unable to contain the fury that seethes within. On Bonny Bunch of Roses, taken from the classic album Ragged Kingdom, there’s disdain and an almost unspeakable power to her.

She may not move much but when you have a voice that can convey love and hate, joy and dismay in the way that she can, who cares? All the while Oysterband creates a huge storm around her, Sean Randle’s drums the prelude to a deluge.

It speaks volumes that, on their own farewell tour, there are moments when Oysterband leave Tabor on stage to sing solo. Les Baker’s Roseville Fair is entirely unaccompanied, darkly humorous and show-stopping, the story delivered with a wink and a sly grin. Hills of Shiloh, simply performed with Alan Prosser’s acoustic guitar, is heartbreaking, a remembrance of war soaked in emotion.

Perhaps, though, it is when everyone is on stage that the power of these seven brilliant musicians is felt most strongly. Susie Clelland sees the boys in the band massing around Tabor, their voices buoying her up along with some foot-tapping folk-rock.

Trad favourite, John Barleycorn, is muscular, driven by Telfer’s fluid fiddle. Sweet Sixteen is a capella, seven voices swelling, warming, enveloping. It is glorious.

There are contemporary(ish) cover versions too. All Tomorrow’s Parties sees fiddle and cello buzzing and thrumming around Tabor’s skeletal take on the Velvet’s classic. An encore of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit is suitably psychedelic, as forgotten words fall down a swirling rabbit-hole.

It’s Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart that is nothing short of remarkable though. In the hands of June Tabor and Oysterband’s singer, John Jones, it becomes the ultimate lovegonewrong song. It’s even more creepy, even darker, even more restrained than the original and all the better for it.

Tabor, occasionally, takes a break and when she does Oysterband are left to say goodbye in their own way. Where the World Divides, River Runs and Roll Away are wonderfully solid folk stompers, choral harmonies and a beautiful interplay between fiddle and cello effortlessly inspiring grins and handclaps.

Jones’ voice is strong, only wavering when, every now and again, the emotions of farewell get too much. For All That Way For This, the six range across the stage, shuffling drums and mandolin showing that Oysterband are capable of fun as well as heart-string tugging.

By the time Put Out the Lights rolls ‘round there are people in the packed Beacon with tears streaming down their faces. Not only will this be the last time we get to see Oysterband on a Bristol stage but, between Jones and Tabor, every emotion has been comprehensively wrung from every person in the place.

It was a hell of a way to say goodbye.

 

Source: Review: Oysterband / June Tabor, Bristol Beacon – ‘A hell of a goodbye”

Lankum review – eerie, overwhelming radical Irish folk already feels centuries old

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The Mercury-nominated four-piece play every song as if they’re fighting with it, gasping for air before verses

By Katie Hawthorne

A menacing rumble fills the Queen’s Hall. Four empty chairs line the front of the stage, crowded by instruments: fiddles, guitars, hand organs, pipes, pedals, a harmonium. Slowly, the rumble builds into a fidgety clatter, as if a ghostly orchestra is preparing to play, and Lankum walk on stage, their first notes bleeding into the din.

Such eerie theatre is a fitting introduction to the Dublin folk band, who turn traditional songs into fresh horrors and write stormy, gothic elegies to modern life which already feel centuries old. Their latest album, the Mercury prize-nominated False Lankum, is bound together by similarly haunted atmospherics, and yet it still feels a surprise when the band – Radie Peat, Cormac Mac Diarmada and brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch – pull their first song proper out of this mist.

They have a ferocious physicality to their musicianship, and although Daragh describes new (old) song The New York Trader as a “workout, every time”, just moments later he is hunched over his guitar with a violin bow, sawing as if cutting a thick rope. The Rocky Road to Dublin is sung with such intensity that the band collectively gasps for air before each verse, both meditative and ominous. The weather worsens further for The Pride of Petravore: pipes roar and Mac Diarmada’s fiddle turns into a horrifying groan.

Then, as if the evening has been breezy entertainment until now, Peat offers a blunt warning: “We wrote this one during level-five lockdown. Probably why it’s so intense.” Go Dig My Grave is the showstopper of False Lankum, a bone-crunchingly heavy ballad about love and death. Peat’s astonishing voice cuts through the dark, and the song builds around her: four-piece harmonies, guitar strummed like a funeral march, and a doom-laden siren with the circular swing of a lighthouse’s beam.

“We always sing, even when we’re losing,” goes their first single Cold Old Fire. This mix of grief and joy is why some songs live so long, and to close the night Lankum offers the latter: a rowdy version of Bear Creek has the audience whooping and stamping in cleansing release.

Source: Lankum review – eerie, overwhelming radical Irish folk already feels centuries old