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Review: Gadarene, The Folk House – ‘Infectious and wildly upbeat’
Bristol based folk-dub-jazz-almost-everything-else-in-the-world five piece, Gadarene are massive festival favourites. It’s not hard to see why.
They play infectious, wildly upbeat, wholly instrumental dance tunes that cause feet to twitch, smiles to widen.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that a set of sixteenth and seventeenth century instrumentals, featuring fiddle and flute, might be a little bit polite. You would, however, be quite wrong.
is needed now More than ever
Childgrove, taken from Gadarene’s first full studio album Butchers of Bristol, starts with the flutter of flute and a gently picked mandolin. So far, so idyllic England.
Before you know it, though, it’s taken a funky turn, Laurel Swift’s double bass and Si Paul’s clattering drums giving hip-swinging drive to a tune written somewhere in the 1700s.
English Country Dancing never sounded like this at primary school. There’s something almost acid jazz about Jon Dyer’s flute, something float-y and free.
This freedom escalates rapidly as the evening progresses. Northern Frisk starts as a gentle 3/2 hornpipe; mandolin, fiddle and flute skipping about, double bass keeping step.
The gentleness is hurled aside as the drums crash through, tempo raised, Nick Wyke gives the briefest of pauses, fiddle in hand, and then tears the roof off.
Deliverance-style violin peels pick up the pace. Hands clap. Feet stomp. Then the drop makes you smile. Gadarene are whirling now.
Have you ever heard dub violin? No? Lord Kelly’s Reel takes a tune that’s almost three hundred years old and whacks a melodica on it. And some step dancing (courtesy of Swift). And a dub violin. The result?
Just pure, unadulterated fun. A mash-up that is border-line insane but utterly brilliant. This is dubstep but not as you know it.
Oyster Wife’s Rant casts a glance at a different type of dance tune. This time an ancient folk tune is given an Ibiza re-mix.
Matt Norman’s mandolin and Wyke’s fiddle add the Balearic sunshine, a bowed bass the bottom end, Dyer’s flute brings the heady euphoria. By now even the Folk House audience can’t resist a dance.
Shapes are remembered, and then thrown, laughter rings from the back of the room.
Gadarene have us where they want us now. Pretty Miss’s Fancy is a Regency dance tune originally written for piano so, obviously, the mandolin echos a harpsichord, the flute adding to the Jane Austen elegance.
Until the stately poise turns into a Balkan knees-up and all of those hooped dresses are torn to shreds. All five musicians gleefully trashing traditions, reinvigorating music that could so easily be lost.
These old, old tunes can only survive if they are reassessed and reanimated.
Gadarene fill them with new life, give them new clothes and a funky spring in their step. They become vital, danceable and brilliant fun.
Main photo: Sadie Poole Zane
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