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Review: Eliza Carthy, Bristol Folk House – ‘Electrifying’
Folk music is built on a babble of voices. From storytellers to political orators. From heavenly serenaders to the earthy burr of honesty. From bar-room celebrants to diaphanous fairy children. Voices are the thing.
Eliza Carthy and Jennifer Reid, playing to a packed Folk House, have two of the finest folk voices you’ll ever hear.
Jennifer Reid is proudly, unapologetically, very clearly from Rochdale. She sings with her Lancastrian dialect front and centre, and is funny, chatty and warm. Many of her songs are from the 19th century, and firmly rooted in class struggle; hers is a voice for truth-telling but with a twinkle in the eye and a smile on the lips.
is needed now More than ever
Skiing Owdham Style is, as with the rest of the set, delivered entirely unaccompanied. Reid’s voice is full of character, with edges and a conversational cadence. She draws audiences into observations of the “top knobs” sliding down Northern hills until we’re laughing and nodding, convinced of the silliness of the posh.
There are songs echoing the rhythm of the loom, poems from the 1800s and Manchester street-songs. Some are delivered with a John Cooper Clarke rapid rifle rattle, some with an Eccles cake sweetness, but all exude a joyous charm: the open-heartedness of a smile on Deansgate.
By the end of her set a gorgeous Northern affability has settled over us.
Eliza Carthy (sort of) jokes that it is her job to dispel all that joy with a bit of misery.
Touring as a solo artist for the first time in more than ten years, Carthy is electrifying. She sings almost every song unaccompanied and lets her voice create the most incredible world around her. This is a dark folk cabaret for the end of the world, a defiant blast against the inky blackness.
She lost her mum, the incomparable Norma Waterson, in 2022 and tonight feels like a commemoration and celebration of their friendship. There’s an obvious sadness, but also a real sense that the songs that they sang together should be cherished.
Pulling Hard Against the Stream, taken from her recent EP No Wasted Joy, is a mighty surging river. Quite simply, Carthy can be seen as a soul singer – a singer with an identifiable soul – as she draws life into her lungs and pours her heart out. She is Mahalia Jackson, she is Maria Callas, she is one of the greatest voices most of us will hear.
Her voice has a depth that has been chafed against real life. It holds us as a congregation, rapt.
The reflective mood doesn’t stop there. Carthy notes that, as we get older, we dedicate more things to the people that we lose, and with New York Trader she remembers Simon Emmerson. They played together in Imagined Village and, here, her pain seems almost physical. That voice does remarkable things, it’s assured and reflective, powerful and heartbroken.
On her most recent visits to Bristol, Carthy had been the Queen of the Whirl: frantic fiddle playing, a joyful thrashing maelstrom at the heart of her various bands. She’s not like that tonight. When she does pick up her violin it is to pluck it on the melancholy Cats and Dogs (You Seamen Bold) or to coax cracked desolation from it on May Morning.
She may not attack with her usual ferocity but she is no less captivating. More than once a muttered “beautiful” can be heard as the applause subsides.
She ends with a version of Richard Thompson‘s The Great Valerio and the shadowy, red velvet vaudeville is complete. Carthy throws down a challenge to those “upstart jugglers”, surely knowing that there’s not a single person that can come close to her shape-shifting.
Both Eliza Carthy and Jennifer Reid were extraordinary this evening. Both proved that, beyond doubt, the voice is the thing.
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