REVIEW: CHELTENHAM FOLK FESTIVAL SATURDAY NIGHT CONCERT - SPIERS AND BODEN, CHELTENHAM TOWN HALL

Given the number of people leaving this concert beaming all

over their faces and humming, singing and whistling the boisterous refrain of New York Girls on their way back into

town it's probably safe to say that Jon Spiers and Jon Boden definitely reach

the parts that no other folk acts can.

Perhaps more widely known for their work in the big band Bellowhead,

they brought all the energy and vitality of that phenomenon to the smaller

stage and capped off a wonderful night with some real crowd pleasers from their

already illustrious career. Starting with a slow waltz, just to warm their

fingers up for the frenetic activity to come, they quickly moved into the vigorous

Ironing Board Hornpipe with big fat bass

notes belching from Spiers' melodeon and Boden banging out the beat on his

stomp-box while working his fiddle overtime. Boden's forceful and dramatic vocal

delivery got an early airing on the sly and saucy paean to begging, Tom Padget while the energy built

further on the rocking, thumping Rochdale

Coconut Dance.

A slower interlude calmed things down just a little when

Boden took a solo spot with Seven Yellow

Gypsies, in which the high-born wife deserts her family for the love of a

travelling man. The bloodthirsty pirate song Captain Ward further heightened the evening's unrelenting sense of drama

and theatre, while *****le-Eye Bush, in

which the fraught narrator finally avoids the hangman's noose, had the audience stamping and clapping

for more.

A few more fleet and furious jigs and shanties followed before

a triumphant encore of New York Girls

sent the audience happily off into the damp night.

Earlier the genial Andy Cutting opened the evening's proceedings

mesmerising the capacity audience with his gentle, lyrical and simply brilliant

melodeon playing.  It is rare for a solo

exponent of this instrument to be able to hold the close attention of nearly a thousand

people for the best part of an hour but the ease with he accomplished this showed

why he has been in such demand over his twenty five year career, having worked

with artists as diverse as Kate Rusby, Sting, and Chumbawamba.

The four-piece Tom McConville Band kicked off the middle

section of the evening with a rousing, foot stomping Home, Where My Heart Lives, a hint of the hoedown giving this a different

flavour from what the festival had seen thus far. This theme continued with the

country-tinged and swinging Pretty Fair Maid

and Foxy getting the audience clapping

along. The gentle Listen to the Wind was

like a lullaby for grown-ups with McConville's warm Geordie voice enveloping

the crowd like a warm blanket. Shona Kipilings' accordion was a perfect foil

for McConville's sweeping fiddle on an interlude of French café jazz while Phil

Murray's unusual acoustic bass guitar firmly underpinned both. A beautifully flowing

version of Richard Thompson's iconic song Beeswing

paved the way for a well-deserved encore of skittering and swinging reels, McConville's

fiddle still soaring high into the rafters.

Eric Worrall