I can’t remember the last time I felt such a warm and convivial atmosphere at a gig, and tonight’s visit to one of Edinburgh Folk Club’s regular Wednesday evening events is a welcome breath of fresh air away from the stagnant cellars I normally frequent. In fact, the last time I saw Alasdair Roberts play was to a capacity crowd at Cabaret Voltaire which ended with him unceremoniously having his plug pulled so as to make way for the next audience herd and that night’s club.
Thankfully, tonight at The Pleasance is a far more relaxed affair. Only twenty or so people are here in this intimate theatre space, surprising considering Roberts’ ascendancy in the British folk scene but perhaps less so given the total lack of publicity given to tonight’s show. What few who are here are clearly EFC regulars and the evening is less a normal concert performance than social club night (complete with raffle).
Support is woven around Roberts’ two sets this evening and comes from Dumfries’s Darcy DaSilva and her sweet-tongued evocations of bucolic pastoral life which manage to just stop short of saccharine, perhaps helped by the resurgent green leaves finally displaying themselves in the Pleasance courtyard.
Roberts himself is currently touring his acclaimed “A Wonder Working Stone” album on Drag City as well as the recently reissued “Farewell Sorrow” from 2003. Playing solo tonight, with just guitar and pint of guiness as props, Roberts is utterly spellbinding. His two sets splice self-penned material with traditional ballads, his own reedy, keening voice supplanted by the gentle spontaneous murmur of the folk club stalwarts on latter songs such as “The Bough of the Golden Vanity” and “Fair Flower Of Northumberland”.
Roberts utterly inhabits all the songs he plays, crouched over his guitar and wrenching the words from himself as they flow outward into elongated passages of voice and language stretched into musical form, at times similar to the late John Martyn jamming with The Incredible String Band. This is folk music tapping into dark and macabre sources, our shared tradition of sharing stories of lust, sex and death, as proven by a mesmerising final acapella rendition of “Carlisle Wall” in which Roberts is joined by the small audience’s whispering chorus of ghosts.