Like ‘Heart Of Oak’, Richard Hawley’s moving tribute to her aunt legendary aunt Norma, MARRY WATERSON is tall and beguiling. As the daughter of George Knight and the late Lal Waterson, you don’t need me to remind you that she’s a member of one of British folk’s most respected dynasties or that her reputation thus automatically precedes.
Yet Waterson commands respect regardless of her background. She strides onstage purposefully and opens her set wholly a capella with a lyric set to the sound of gentle birdsong and flowing nature and you can hear a pin drop in the auditorium. Not a bad start by anyone’s lofty standards and the vibe remains warm after she’s joined by her acolytes, guitarist/ writing partner David A. Jaycock and multi-instrumentalist Andy Preston.
Though she first guested on Lal and Norma Waterson’s LP ‘A True-Hearted Girl’ as early as 1977, Marry’s won post-Y2K critical acclaim on her own terms; both as a sculptress and for the two albums she recorded with brother Oliver Knight for One Little Indian.
Recorded in collaboration with Jaycock, her third OLI outing ‘Two Wolves’, forms the bulk of her set tonight and while W&H must confess relative prior ignorance, tracks such as the rippling ‘The Honey & The Seaweed’ (based upon a lyric – and a shopping list – of her mother’s) and autoharp-assisted current single ‘Digging For Diamonds’ suggest back-tracking is going to be necessary.
Her confidence up after an enthusiastic response to the latter, Waterson even gets most of the crowd howling along with the feral “ow-ooh!” refrain from ‘Two Wolves” title track and she eventually departs triumphant after a mesmerizing ‘Caught On The Coattails’ which ends in a hailstorm of reverb and feedback capable of shaking the very foundations of Cecil Sharp House. Consider us converted, basically.
It could be argued, meanwhile, that RICHARD HAWLEY has very little to prove tonight. He’s already released two Mercury Music Prize-nominated albums, his 2005 breakthrough ‘Coles Corner’ and 2012’s ‘Standing At The Sky’s Edge’ and his recent (seventh) LP ‘Hollow Meadows’ again garnered a ream of critical acclaim. As a result, this second jaunt around the UK and Ireland is something of a lap of honour and Hawley and his band of renown could be excused for simply going through the motions
To their credit, however, they are fully-focussed and simply sublime tonight. Arriving in Cork on the back of blinding shows in London and Manchester, they’re clearly on formidable form and as the impeccably cool, denim-clad Hawley thanks us all “for flying Hawley Air, we’re cleared for take-off now”, they rattle straight through an expansive, ante-raising version of ‘Hollow Meadows’ highlight ‘Which Way.’
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Aside from a euphoric ‘Tonight The Streets Are Ours’ and a heart-melting ‘Open Up Your Door’, there’s little in the main set dating from prior to 2012, but that’s hardly a disappointment. The best of ‘Hollow Meadows” introspective treats such as ‘Sometimes I Feel’ and the aching, vulnerable ‘I Still Want You’ adapt ably in the expansive live arena, while Hawley announces the gloriously fragile ‘Tuesday P.M’ with a hilariously deadpan, expletive laced preamble about how it’s the most miserable song he’s ever written and how he’d ideally love us to “talk all the way through it, that’d be fuckin’ brilliant.”
Elsewhere, while Hawley’s built his reputation on beautifully-crafted, shimmering retro-pop, he can rock with the best of them in concert. His band’s Sheffield steel gleams especially brightly on the visceral selections from ‘Standing At The Sky’s Edge’; not least on the angular, fuzz bass-driven ‘Leave Your Body Behind You’ and the towering, urban misadventure-riven titular song. They ramp up the tension even further on ‘Down In The Woods’ which veers from mod-style energy to a full-on Bunnymen-esque psychedelic blow-out featuring Hawley inserting eerie snatches of ‘If You Go Down To The Woods Today’ and ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’
The formidable final strait, meanwhile, includes a yearning ‘Don’t Stare At The Sun’, poignant ‘Heart Of Oak’ and finally a fascinating, if slightly schizophrenic ‘There’s A Storm A-Comin”, which gradually slips from its traditional, Spectorian shackles during a muscular extended final coda.
A celebratory three-song encore, meanwhile, commences with a perfectly-weighted ‘Coles Corner’ and continues with a tender ‘What Love Means’ before a hypnotic extended version of ‘The Ocean’ concludes what – if I may have permission to hijack Hawley’s airline analogy – has been an exhilarating and turbulence-free ride.
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