The Alehouse Sessions

Usher Hall 15/8/24

 As the audience  settled into their brightly coloured bean-bags they were confronted with a bare stage, empty except for a harmonium, a double bass, an enormous bsss drum and a djembe. Oh, and two small tables at either end of the stage loaded with bottles of beer. The conceit of the evening was that we were to witness a session in an English alehouse roughly around the time of the Restoration in the later 17th century. No beer, no session. The nine musicians wandered on, mingling and chatting and clinking bottles before a tune emerged from the hubbub. Played initially by one of the four violinists who was gradually joined by the other three, two baroque guitars, and the other instruments already mentioned. All nine of the Anglo-Nordic ensemble are superb musicians, strolling round the stage, interacting with each other, creating sounds that ranged from silvery, viol-like backdrops to muscular bass and complex cross-rhythms.

The musicians’ preferred period was a time when England really was a Land ohne Musik after Cromwell shut down all places of entertainment. These measures always prove to be futile, however, as the human spirit will inevitably prevail. That spirit was much in evidence in the drinking song with its uplifting chorus (“who will not merry, merry be shall never taste of joy”), and with the sprightly Steven Player’s (the only member of the group whose name I caught) superb jig to the strains of ‘The Irish Washerwoman’, a solo dance which saw him jump on and off the stage in a manner that belied his 65 years.

It is interesting that the Alehouse Sessions draw on a period when the concept of ‘folk music’ was a long way in the future. Popular music was drawn from many sources and collected in best-sellers such as Playford’s ‘English Dancing Master’ which featured tunes from all parts of the British Isles and snatches of composers like Purcell. Perhaps, however, it is my 21st century folkie ears that make me uneasy when I hear trained voices tackle songs that are now characterised as folk songs and which have developed their own tradition of performance styles. In this case what we gained in control and diction we lost in pulse and rhythm as both the sea shanty ‘Haul Away, Joe’ and ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsies’ were a little pedestrian in feel. They were a lot of fun, however, and a very biddable audience was not slow to join in the fun.

Highlights in among the hi-jinks were a well-judged ‘Niel Gow’s Lament for the Death of his Second Wife’ which segued into a counter-tenor reading of Burns’s ‘Red, Red Rose’, and a setting of Shakespeare’s ‘You spotted snakes with double tongue’. A well-deserved encore invited the audience to “party like it’s 1699”,  before a beautifully choreographed and hilarious slow-motion alehouse brawl broke out calling time on a hugely entertaining evening.

Photo credit: Andrew Perry