Playlouder - Music is the Network

In a time where folk is no longer taboo in our land and bearded boys and lank-haired girls are amassing the nation over, it falls upon folk (oops) such as myself – not one of nature’s boat-builders, pipe-smokers or meadow-loiterers – to rebel against this inevitably faddish climate in the only way I know how: by briefly skirting around it then denouncing it in favour of something I’m sure nobody will ever like: gospel grindcore, perhaps?

Anyway, my quest brings me this evening to Camden’s Jazz Café (eurgh!) where cider is £4.10 (four pounds and ten pence) a pint, and called ‘Gaymers’, and half the tickets include a sit-down meal. This is the least rock and/or roll venue in town, and boy has it got some competition.

Tonight’s main offenders are Rachel Unthank & The Winterset: broadsheet darlings and folk revivalists, from what I gather. Their audience, almost entirely male, bearded (or bearding), and aged, confirms this early on. 

There are middle aged-couples too – the greatest enemy of all, being as they represent the inevitable fate in its most ideal, and least likely, form; they have come, so I shall callously assume, to check out an act they’ll refer to as The Mercury Music Prize-Nominated Rachel Unthank & The Winterset. (Which is, of course, exactly what I’m doing here.) Now, to be unimpressed:

Mary Hampton hails from Brighton and seems pretty frightened of the audience. In her position I’d be more irritated, I’m sure, as her one-woman performance requires careful attention and much of the outer-ring is too busy discussing it’s new coffee table (and how unmetaphorical it is) to pay her the attention she, surprisingly, really does deserve.

I’ve seen a million girls with guitars over the last few years and wanted to have most of them put down. Mary Hampton is different. She’s different from anyone I’ve seen or heard. Ever. And that’s not an easy thing to be. Her shrill – perhaps soulful, definitely sweet – voice is a sound as alien as it is intriguing, and her words boast a rare gift for poetry.

Not since my last Laura Veirs gig have I seen a folkish female so able to make universal sounds entirely her own, and yet Mary Hampton does this entirely on her own, with but a 3/4 size Spanish guitar, a sonorous steel stringed-machine or, for one song that the audience completely fails to sing along to, a piano.

She warms to the performance eventually, and that’s fortunate, because it makes it easier for her audience to warm to her. Although not much for singing just yet, they happily oblige her requests to shake keys and clink glasses during one of her songs.

Having been introduced by Rachel Unthank, Hampton returns the favour in a delightfully civilised manner, and the main act – violinist, pianist and sisters Rachel and Becky sharing singing duties.

What follows is most definitely folk. You will find with many folk bands that they aren’t actually folk: they’re crap indie bands with beards and perhaps a harmonica: they’re a bloke with an acoustic guitar who once tripped over his uncle’s Dylan album: they’re quirky youngsters with a love of unusual-shaped instruments and obscure lyrics. Unthank & co. are pretty much as folk as it gets. The real deal. They’re so folk, in fact, that their inclusion in the MMP list seems utterly anomalous; the prize is for innovation, surely?

Still, an hour or so with the Unthanks and their band reveals a group more interesting, and perhaps even more forward-thinking, than Klaxons, Arctic Monkeys or Franz Ferdinand, to name but a few. Frankly, the traditional songs and styles on show tonight have loftier branches as well as deeper roots; take the chilling lament for virginity, ‘I Wish, I Wish’: performed with trance-inducing accordion drones courtesy of (usual) violinist Niopha Keegan and Stef Conner hammering at the lowest piano keys and plucking at the insides of the instrument as though torturing it; it’s a song as old as civilisation and cannot hope to become irrelevant.

And there’s the excellent medley of raucous numbers called ‘Blue’s Gaen Oot O’The Fashion’, in which blokes bugger off by night to join the navy and those remaining cruelly rebuff their feminine pursuers, (“The lad wi’ the trousers on / He says he will not have me”), who are left to sit around on piers worrying about the colour of their dresses and waiting to get pregnant. (Possibly clogdancing while they’re at it judging by tonight’s performance.) It’s a much more vivid picture of northern life than, for example, ‘I Predict a Riot’.

Regardless of the evident proficiency of the players, and the quality  of the voices of all four, that the youth might be convinced of the relevance of folk purism – albeit with classical and experimental arrangements – remains unlikely, but Rachel Unthank & The Winterset stand proud as an outfit obsessed with, immersed in, and at the forefront of their area of expertise.

The sisters’ combined interpretation of the bleakly-alcoholic beaten-wife’s tale ‘Blue Bleezin’ Blind Drunk’ pisses all over James Yorkston’s version, (for want of a less crude expression), and by the rousing encore of ‘Fareweel Regality’ there’s barely a voice in the audience not singing along.

A rare thing indeed: a good night out in Camden. And me being proven wrong. (That’s even rarer - the latter.)

The girls' rapport is as natural as it is endearing and despite the obvious adulation with which the audience regards them they remain unfazed and modest – only briefly referring to the unexpected blessing of “The m m p” with a sense of collective finger-crossing.

To be honest, if they win the Mercury Music Prize, I’ll eat one of my less stylish hats. Not to say they don’t deserve to, but being up against Burial surely makes it a no-brainer? Either way – if it’s not one of the two then I’m going to destroy my coffee table in protest.