Dry ice and smoke more readily associated with a rock gig than a folk concert. Not an empty seat in the building. Steve Knightley's silhouette back lit through the smoke. The audience obediently deliver a prolonged standing ovation.
Show of Hands are as good as they always are, which is to say, very good indeed. It is hard to say how these two Devonshire pub-singers have so successfully turned themselves into a brand.
They seem to be officially a quartet now; at any rate they have stopped printing "Show of Hands WITH Miranda Sykes" on the tickets. They are joined by bodhran wizard Cormac Byrne. Every folk club has someone who can knock out a rhythm on bodhran, but it's really something to hear Cormac producing full-on percussion melodies. There is endless banter about Irish accents and the correct way to pronounce "scone". Phil and Steve are honorary doctors of music; Cormac is studying for a full fledged PhD and it shows. Never has an audience been happier with an extended drum solo.
We have a Black Water Side and a First We Take Manhattan. Drekcly is introduced as Cornish Reggae. ("Drekcly" is the West Country equivalent of the Spanish "mañana".) The title track off the new album is a Tom Paxman-esque sequence of historical anecdotes in the form of, er, a Morris Bangra mash-up:
Churchill, Bradley, Monty and the rest
Its D-Day in the morning and they’re drinking with the best
Brandy, cigars and a lot of pretty girls
"Tonight we’re gonna party and tomorrow save the world"
The audience dutifully do vaguely bangra-ish hand movements in the chorus.
Show of Hands are canny, crowd-pleasing performers and they wind up the show with four out of five of their Greatest Hits. Everyone in the audience knows all the words. We wail along to Country Life; endlessly repeat "all the way to Santiago.."; and do the final chorus of Cousin Jack by ourselves. The main set winds up with the Galway Farmer which, considering the location, it pretty much had to.
There is a pretty wide range of songs here; some serious ones and some very silly ones; some folk standards and some covers. And yet everything they do sounds exactly like a Show of Hands number.
Having missed them last month in Bath I had to spend the day in Cheltenham town. Unlike the farmer in the song I didn't sleep on the hillside but booked into the Travelodge. It was worth the trip.
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