Review: Sam Sweeney, Bristol Beacon – ‘A man possessed’

Traditionally, Mothering Sunday was the time to visit your “mother” church. The place where you belonged, the place where your spirit was happiest.

There’s something incredibly fitting, therefore, that Sam Sweeney should spend Mothers’ Day at the Bristol Beacon. If there’s a place that he seems to love, then it’s here.

His last album, Escape That, was released a while ago but he “hadn’t got round” to touring it. Now that he has, he is, he freely admits, a bit over-excited.

Although seated he is a fizzy, twitching, ball of energy, knees bouncing, feet flying, showing sneakered soles. A man possessed by the music his wonderful band makes.

If the expectation was that this would be an evening of souped-up trad folk (like his Bellowhead work), or melancholy World War One elegies (like the Made in the Great War album) or, even, gorgeous baroque folk tunes (like Leveret) then Sweeney managed to be none of these.

Escape That is an album of new-sounding-old folk with great fairy-light trails of jangle-pop strewn all over it.  This evening, he exploded in giddy stratospheres.

At the centre of every tune is Sweeney’s fluid fiddle, sending bright beams out across the hillsides. He is the sound of a mirror reflecting shards of sunlight, casting dazzling arcs of colour.

On Ruby, from Escape That, Sweeney’s fiddle is glorious, a sweet, high line buoyed by a choppy, indie acoustic guitar from Archie Churchill-Moss.

Louis Campbell provides a shoegaze-shimmer hunched over an electric guitar, teasing filigree lines while Ben Nicholls’ double bass rumbles, gently. It’s music that pushes at its own boundaries, an excitable puppy destroying a cardboard box from the inside.

Nightshifting/Atlantica is soundtrack perfection, crashing waves of fiddle and Campbell’s electric star-light glisten producing wide-screen wonders.

Feet Together Jump is gentler, guitars and bass painting the deepest, darkest ocean whilst the fiddle moonglows across it. There is darkness and light but the light always wins.

Sweeney’s love of indie-pop shines through on Deep Water Shallow (End), a folk tune which, improbably, borrows Weezer chords. It’s painted with the greens and blues of nostalgia, of a strummed acoustic and a sense of bubbling joy.

Want to Fly, Want to Flee is another hat-tip to Weezer, another exuberant burst where Sweeney plays his fiddle as though trying to catch Tinkerbell with the tip of his nose.

He dedicates Westering to Jane Harbour (of Bristol’s brilliant Spiro) and tilts into the tune so far that it threatens to sweep him away. This is forward facing folk music powered by a huge heart and a bigger smile.

Following a few more traditional tunes, the odd lightning speed hornpipe and a lush piece of swirling, pastoral idyll, Sweeney’s band arrive at Pink Steps.

Allegedly written after a dream in a tour bus parked outside this very building (back when it was the Colston Hall) it absolutely rocks. It’s in continuous motion, a sparkle-decked escalator, the entrance to an especially glorious, euphoric space. Sweeney’s fiddle, again, hinting at Folk but embracing so much more.

If the Beacon is Sweeney’s spiritual home, then he lit all of the candles, blazed all of the lanterns and filled the whole place with a jangle-pop-beautiful-folk kaleidoscope.

Main photo: Gavin McNamara

Read next:

• Review: The Carrivick Sisters, Downend Folk & Roots – ‘Wonderfully old-timey tunes’
• Review: Martha Tilston, The Jam Jar – ‘Pure and majestic’
• Review: Craig Finn, The Exchange – ‘A feeling of togetherness’