A Broadside Concert

To the Exeter Phoenix again last night, this time to see Sam Lee, Lisa Knapp and Nathaniel Mann perform a selection of Broadside Ballads. Their selection though, of about a dozen or so, was narrowly proscribed. The performance was as much a show as a concert. The songs chosen were almost entirely dark in tone, and performed in a contemporary way, sometimes as if they were merely a jumping off point for the music, which was filled with strange percussive noises and odd distortions, as distorted as the pictures that flickered above the stage. The music took place in a stygian gloom of dry ice and uncertain shadows. It became like some ghostly music heard from the next room of an old house, where if you enter it is to find only an absence. Music performed by revenants.
And of course, this atmosphere was no doubt the intention, achieved cleverly by the performers(plus a subtle bassist and percussionist) notable for their singing but accompanying themselves on a variety of traditional and odd instruments (bowed banjo and meat-cleaver anyone?) which served to emphasise the uncanniness of the proceedings. You were taken in and gripped for a while by a hokum conjuring of the past.
But to cavil, It was the Broadside with the raunch and merriment taken out for the sake of an agenda. Then when the lights went up at the conclusion and the audience were encouraged to join in Pleasant and Delightful (yes, really!) we crashed back into another world.