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Lee Fisher enjoys a day of rousing, surprising and striking sounds at Day Two of Marrapalooza
Image: Muco by Thomas Jackson
While the whippersnappers were keen to spend their Saturday scurrying up and down the hills of the Ouseburn looking for the next big thing, me and my damaged foot were more than happy to settle down in the loving bosom of Cobalt Studios for a day of (mostly) excellent folk, or folk adjacent, artists.
First up, it was my first chance to see Jasmine Padgett & Her Family Band and it was a fine start to the day. Padgett’s sweet but melancholy voice and her excellent banjo (god, I love a banjo) were backed by trumpet, shruti box, viola and some gorgeous harmonies. The whole thing was a sun-dappled, slightly mournful delight, with a mariachi-inflected trumpet line here or a fine harmony from Sam Baxter there helping things really soar. A couple of times I found myself wishing there were a couple more members of the Family Band to make things really take flight. Padgett is happy to push the boundaries of folk, making room for dissonance and experimentation, which takes her music to some interesting and powerful places.
Jennifer Reid is a force of nature, a radical folk singer with a firebrand heart, and she’s been ‘disrupting the folk scene since 2015’. She’s a powerful presence – all skullet and ink, broad gestures and defiance – and her voice is a rousing, inspiring thing, not without subtlety but with the energy to ‘shake your chains to earth like dew’. She’s also hysterically funny, as she throws shade at Yorkshire, Morris dancers, merchant class cavaliers and the old blokes at the Cumberland Arms Irish session. Reid invests every song with her personality, acting out the parts, giving us comedic asides or titbits of history, gossiping like a Salford landlady. I learned that opener The Brisk Lad was first collected in Dorset, which made my day, and we got a stunning half an hour or so of Industrial Revolution work songs and the ballads of the agricultural poor. A friend of mine’s marker for folk he likes is simply, ‘do I believe them?’. Well, I believe in Jennifer Reid, as far from the slavish, ossified museum pieces that are rife on the scene.
After that, I’m afraid Jim Ghedi was a big disappointment. I’m sure I saw him years ago in acoustic mode and he was fine, but today we got a lifeless, leaden folk-rock version. The muddy sound didn’t help, I guess, but it was all very ‘everything louder than everything else’. The drummer played every song like it was When The Levee Breaks, and the overall sound was rooted in the wrong bits of seventies folk. A couple of fiddle-driven tunes fared better but it was all a bit club-footed, especially after such inspiring sets from Padgett and Reid.
After a short break, things resumed with Elanor Moss. A new name to me, but she’s pretty, pretty good. I get the sense she has a more acoustic indie past but this evening she was firmly in bucolic folky mode. Her voice has a rich dreaminess, and she has a way with a striking image lyrically. At times I was reminded of Josephine Foster – something about the vocal style – and as I was also reflecting on a Joanna Newsom comparison, Moss hit us with a cover of On A Good Day. Hints of Lisa O’Neill in there too. Some of her songs felt a bit lacking but she’s definitely got something worth keeping an eye on.
The day’s big surprise was next. Hands up who had ‘young lad of British/Burundian heritage sings an 8th century olde English charm to calm bees while playing an inanga, an east African zither’ on their Marrapalooza bingo card? Yeh, me neither. Muco was a revelation. A softly-spoken guy with an instrument that looks like a surf board and sounds a little like a kora, he’s on a mission to connect the dots between Olde, Middle and modern English and gives us the Venerable Bede’s death bed song, a 13th century love ballad, an acapella lullaby with gentle clapping and a version of the Lord’s Prayer that leaps across time and language. Genuinely remarkable.
Less surprising but no less remarkable was Gwenifer Raymond, back in Newcastle for the second time inside a year. From the moment she takes her seat and her hair falls across her face, she’s in her own world, locked into a battle with her guitar, grappling with it, pushing it farther. It’s no less fucking incredible the second time, and if anything she played even faster and harder than she did at the Lubber Fiend. Her music draws on folk (British and American), blues, ragas, the American primitives, slide, country and rock and yet despite all these influences, if I heard just a few seconds on the radio I’d know straight away it was her. A few mumbled words of thanks and she was gone.
Circumstances meant missing Milkweed, which was a shame, but this was a really enjoyable and thoughtfully programmed stage in one of Newcastle’s very best spaces. Marvellous stuff.
