This concert was an example of the way that folk music can take off on wildly different paths. Trembling Bells, the support act, is a Glaswegian four-piece that is inspired in equal parts by ancient balladry and psychedelic rock. Lavinia Blackwall, a classically trained soprano, displayed fealty to folk roots with unaccompanied singing before the band blasted into a garage- rock instrumental while three female morris dancers, one wearing a horse’s head, jigged about. To fuse such pagan silliness with musical adventurousness and the world of folk was inspired.
The Unthanks take a very different root to presenting old ballads to a new audience. In the 1900s the musicologist Cecil Sharp collected rural folk songs in the hope of preventing them from dying out but, finding that they were generally concerned with sex, death and misery, bowdlerised and prettied them up for middle-class sensibilities. The Unthanks are continuing this tradition, couching the words and tunes to stark old folk songs in elegant string arrangements and restrained settings.
This could be unbearably precious, were it not that the Unthank sisters Rachel (heavily pregnant) and Becky (just engaged), who do the singing, are likeable and the music, mostly arranged by Adrian McNally, is starkly beautiful. When they sang a song from their native Newcastle called Gan to the Kye, thick Geordie accents making unlikely bedfellows with modernist classical arrangements, you couldn’t fail to be struck by it. Evidence of the power of their musical persuasion came when the girls moved to the front to sing, unaccompanied, without mikes.
However, keeping your music on one slow tempo and at minor-key level, even when including covers of Tom Waits and King Crimson, is asking a lot of the casual listener, especially when doing so much as ordering a beer from the bar results in hordes of shiny-pated men with glasses angrily turning their heads to shush at you. The audience was excessively, creepily reverential. However, levelled out by Trembling Bells’s more insouciant approach, the Unthanks’ polished set did make for an affecting evening of very British music.
Norwich Arts Centre, tonight; Apex, Bury St Edmunds, tomorrow; Town Hall, Birmingham, Weds; O2 Academy, Liverpool, Thurs