Review: Saturday Night Concert, 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.
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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
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