Lankum

Fiddlers



Fiddlers nightclub is situated up a backstreet, round a corner, between a self-storage depot and an industrial estate. It looks as if it used to be a prison, because it was. Lankum are one of the biggest things in Irish music, described by someone as being more Dublin than the Dubliners. So there are four hundred and fifty folkies crammed into a smallish space. The beer isn't great. People have to physically squeeze past other people to go to the bathroom. The stage is raised, so everyone can see the band. Assuming they don't have a tall fat guy in a hat standing in front of them.

I get why some bands prefer to play in front of standing audiences. Blackbeards Tea Party have forsaken the Folk House because they don't like singing raucous rocky sea-shanties to sedentary audiences. Bellowhead mostly played to seated venues, but people stood up anyway Come to think of it, Bellowhead played Fiddlers before they were famous. I also heard Show of Hands here, back before I knew all the words to Cousin Jack. It was probably less crowded; or perhaps I was younger. But no-one was dancing tonight; it mostly wasn't that kind of a gig and there was no space to move even if it had been. I can't see what it would have lost in a more concert-like setting.

A large man with a thumpy guitar comes on stage, and starts to sing a slow mournful prison ballad which begins "when I was a young man not so many years ago"; so I know I have come to the right place. He sings a version of Mrs McGraw, (with a too ri a fol did diddle da). He plays a song on two metal whistles simultaneously which he learned from a fairy, or possibly a man dressed as a fairy on Halloween. Also a fine old Shirley Collins number about the lord who tries to shag an fair maiden behind a haystack and ends up losing his horse. He was as Irish and folkie as anyone could want.

The tone of Lankum's act was evident from the opening number: the Wild Rover, delivered at about a quarter of the normal speed. A guitar beats out a tum-tum-a-tum rhythm throughout; the fiddle drones. There is at least three minutes of instrumental after they lyric, all wailing and rhythm; not a jig in sight. The song is mysterious; frightening almost. You can imagine someone singing it while escorting you to a wicker man. It's the best treatment of a traditional song I've heard all year. Anyone expecting to sing "no, nay, never" will have been deeply disappointed.

Almost as astonishing was the closing number an even-more-slowed down rendition of Katy Cruel. The tongue twisting lyrics were taken just about as slowly as it is possible to take a song:

"Oh that I was where I would be
then would I be where I am not
here I am where I must be
where I would be I cannot".

I have said before that I don't respond very well to that slow deliberate delivery which the Unthanks, for example, do: but this was in an entirely different ball-park. They were taking traditional material and making it sinister; making the innocent words sound threatening; almost as if they have some kind of incantatory significance which the band perceives but we don't.

Not a song for people in a hurry:  I don't think it came in much under fifteen minutes.

The crowd was very pleased, but there were few out-and-out crowd-pleasers: even the Rocky Road to Dublin felt dark. The last time I heard Lankum they were still called Lynched, and were playing street songs and musical-hall numbers, I Belong To A Boozing Family and the Irish Jamboree. People called out for Sgt William Taylor (toora loola loola loola rue) but the band demurred: although they did do Henry My Son as an encore. This is the street version of Lord Randall and is what passes for an upbeat number.

What'll you leave your sweetheart, Henry my son?
What'll you leave your sweetheart, my beloved one?
A rope to hang her, a rooooopppppe to hang her.
Make my bed, I've a pain in my head.... 

This is a band who are still breaking new ground; finding new things to do with traditional music; and it is good enough to fill a remote venue in Bristol on a Monday night.  (There was a bona fide coach parked outside.) The atmosphere was so squashed and so overheated that I missed a couple of song because I literally thought I was going to be sick or faint. And given how much of the material was down beat and serious; I can't see what it would have lost in a concert venue.

This was probably my favourite gig of the year, and I look forward to hearing them again before too long. But hopefully in a venue where it is possible to breath.