From the off, it's clear tonight this is going to be a little bit special. What was initially a day off in the touring schedule to promote James Yorkston & The Athletes' superb new album "Just Beyond The River" has instead brought the band down to the heart of rural West Cork to play a low-key show in the area's funkiest venue.
It's an incredibly generous bill, too. First up is singer/ songwriter ADRIAN CROWLEY. He's dark and slightly swarthy, dressed down in a sage green army shirt and armed with merely a wired, brusque Telecaster complete with a "mystery wire" tucked enigmatically into his trousers.
As it turns out this is more then enough to power his dark, sparse and experience-scarred songs. Unfamiliarity scuppers too much detail, but his rich delivery is somewhere between prime Chris Isaak and Smog's Bill Callahan, and ensures songs like "A Northern Country" and one possibly called "Harmony Road" stay with you afterwards. "Brakelines", with its' distorted, echoey guitar and deceptively serene vocal is even better and suggests Crowley is a man you should make the effort to arrive early for.
Which is also sage advice where KING CREOSOTE is concerned. This enigmatic character's work with Fife's intriguing Fence Collective has been continually championed at W&H and while - in a live, direct and acoustic setting like this - the more esoteric, out-there qualities of his work (call it folk if you dare) are absent, there's still plenty to connect with.
KC'S ultra-fertile recording ethic even puts the workaholic likes of Bob Pollard and Mark.E.Smith in the shade (he later tells your reviewer his new Fence-related opus has been out for all of three weeks), but quality control is still very much the key, and tonight he delivers witty new songs like "Crow's Feet" (with a reference to his Dad sometimes known as "Bill The Bear") in his keening Fife burr and dips into an amazing back catalogue your reviewer is breathlessly trying to catch up with.
His set's all too short, and by the time he straps on the accordion for his last couple of tunes, his half hour seems to have vanished. "The standard of accordion playing will soon be going up like this," he quips, raising his hand like a graph sweeps upward and nodding at The Athletes' Reuben Taylor out in the crowd, but he's too modest and it really makes KC's final tune "Love Your Present": a tale of lies, deceit and hand-blown Italian glass set in his home village of Crail in Fife. It's got the skewhiff folk-pop sensibility of his best work and leaves us wanting much more. Which, of course, is how it should be.
The last time this writer saw JAMES YORKSTON & THE ATHLETES, meanwhile, was in the auspicious, but slightly formal setting of Cork's Triskel Arts Centre. It's something of a contrast to the relaxed, downhome atmosphere of people quietly (or not so quietly) nursing pints we find at Connolly's. Indeed, it's the perfect place to enjoy the Athletes' woozily gracious songs of love, loss and longing.
The band respond in informal kind by dispensing with a set list and playing whatever takes their fancy at a given time. They open with the gentle, hymnal caress of "In Your Hands" and proceed with choice selections from both the albums. Other early highlights include "This Time Tomorrow" - where double bassist Doogie Paul switches to banjo - and the windswept reverie of the lovely, melancholy "Surf Song." The way James lets all the emotion bleed out from the line "I do all I can to keep my life moving on" in this latter is one of the evening's highlights for this writer.
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The informality of the setting brings out the raconteur in James. He prefaces numerous songs with stories such as the one involving three cats rounding on and killing a snake and the one leading into "Heron", which he describes as "being about my beloved falling into a ditch and instead of helping her out, I started laughing and doing funny voices until she pulled me in as well." Despite considerable pressure, he refuses to tell the one involving "the guy from Dr. & The Medics...it's a truly horrible image."
No matter. The music more than compensates. The Athletes play with an almost supernatural understanding, and are masters of subtlety. Accordion maestro Reuben Taylor moves over to play piano during a perfectly-poised "Moving Up Country, Roaring The Gospel", while Faisal Rahman's drumming is both understated and superb and his brushed shufflebeats insert a tangible swing into swaying beauties like "Cheating The Game."
Requests keep coming and while The Athletes baulk at "Bohemian Rhapsody", James and Reuben valiantly attack Motorhead's "Ace Of Spades." Quite what Lemmy would make of this version complete with accordion splashes and finger cymbal is hard to imagine, but it's both hilarious and brilliant in this form.
They sign off with their inimitible cover of old folk tune "I Know My Love". King Creosote joins in to add some intense piano as the song's skirling melodies unfold. It travels from a whisper to a stormy hypno-drone crescendo that Can or The Velvets would be proud of and is utterly sublime. It's also just about the perfect way to finish up what has been quite a night.
Quite rightly, neither James Yorkston or King Creosote have much time for the 'nu-folk' tags that seem to follow them around. Far from being trendy, left-field icons, they are warm, approachable people who have a real gift for writing excellent, emotionally-loaded songs that gently give up their secrets the more you listen. Accordingly, tonight was a credit to everyone involved.
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