Leveret

New Room

When I was first listening to folk music, the much lamented Radio Derby show Folkwaves kept featuring a band called Kerfuffle, consisting of three precociously talented children, including a fiddler named Sam Sweeney. Almost the first folk gig I ever went to was the duo Nancy Kerr and James Fagan, who were joined for two albums by an astonishing squeeze box wizard called Robert Harbron. And although I don't think I ever saw them together, my favourite folk singer [*] Chris Wood was for some years in a duo with an equally astonishing squeeze box wizard called Andy Cutting. Sweeney, Cutting and Harbron are probably three of the best folk musicians in the country; top of the folk-tree in their respective instruments. (Cutting plays melodian; Harbron plays concertina; and there was a time in my life when I wouldn't have known those were different instruments.) 

They play tunes. They play mostly English tunes. Some of them they find in old books; some of them come from the famous Playford book; some of them they make up. They actually play the tunes; there is non of this competitive speed-playing that comes into some Scottish performance-bands; and definitely none of that clever stuff where it stops being music and turns into jazz. Often, one of them will play the tune, and then the others will come in and weave more complex patterns around the basic melody. But I can always keep track of what is going on, which I often can't with some of the cleverer bands. I often think of English folk tunes as being geometrical; quite simple patterns of notes which can go round and round and round as long as the band want to keep playing or the audience want to keep dancing.

Leveret don't really do arrangements as such. They play the songs to death while preparing their albums; and then they play them on the stage. No two performances are ever exactly the same.

Leveret is pretty much the only instrumental band I would ever voluntarily put on the CD player or call down off Spotify; and they are certainly the only instrumental band I would buy a ticket to hear live. But I have to say that after two sets and an encore my attention was wavering. 

There were, as a wise man once said, too many notes.

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