NORTHUMBRIAN MUSIC
NIGHTS
What we said about
The LUCKY
BAGS
LUCKY BAGS STRIKE IT
RIGHT!
The good news is that they're getting better. The bad news is that their popularity means it can be difficult to find a seat at their gigs! But the best news is that everybody was satisfied last Friday evening at The King's Head in Allendale.
In one of those evenings where the event overcomes the temporary adversity of recalcitrant sound systems, the return of The Lucky Bags was heralded with a new and very welcome addition, confidence!
There are a few memorable evenings from the past half dozen years, where the entertainer has eschewed amplification and gone it totally unplugged. We can add Friday evening to the pantheon of great nights. Somehow sound au naturel has an added depth of honesty that, when the music is really good, can thrill you to your toes.
Five strong women bestrode (besat?) the intimate stage, from Zena Tubmen on concertina, flute and vocals, Judy Dinning on vocals and acoustic guitar, Julie-Ann Kay on Celtic harp, accordian and vocals, Liz Law on Appalachian and hammered dulcimers, to apprentice bag Emma Welton on very sympathetic fiddle.
Terry Conway, Allendale's own poet laureate, and Simon Howarth from Jez Lowe's Bad Pennies, started the evening off on a manly supportive note, and it was noteworthy that their engagement with the audience helped lend an atmosphere of friendly conviviality, cheerful applause, and intriguing repartée between receivers and deliverers of the music.
Because this was music alive, delivered with the confidence of a brilliant CD, 'Delight in Disorder' just behind them, new bookings lining up in the offing ahead of them, and an audience at home with them.
So perhaps it was not surprising that the music flowed out with such chirrupy confidence, after all. "Maybe' , a Judy Dinning composition, started off the first session with a crescendoing final chord that absolutely seduced the audience, followed in flirtatious fashion with the Allen Taylor number 'If I asked you to dance'. Politics of the traditional kind ensued with the 'Widow's Waltz', and then of the sexual kind, with 'Blue Bleezin' Blind Drunk'. The ghostly 'Military Road' lead on to an unannounced instrumental, no less evocatively realised on all assembled instruments than anything else, especially with Julie-Ann's blues twang on the Celtic Harp, and the set finished saucily with the 'Tinkerman's Daughter'.
After the break came 'The Leather-Winged Bat' and then another bitter-sweet travelling song, 'No Goodbyes'. It was on an instrumental 'The Space Between', particularly, that we realised just how much Emma's sensitive violin was contributing to the whole. She has such a lovely, soft and empathetic touch on a very subtle set of strings. Very feminine, when compared with say, Stuart Hardy's contributions on the CD.
Perhaps it's not safe to dwell too much, in a family newspaper, on the hidden, ginkgo-ish depths of the Lucky Bags' interpretation of 'Fond as a Besom', nor on some of the writhing states of extremis necessitated to strap the small bellows of an accordian around Julie-Ann, but suffice to say that the adult audience were perfectly charmed by the self-deprecating humour of the band.
A tribute to the late Lal Waterson, 'Flying Sparrow' was rapturously received, and 'Howlin' at the Moon' elicited such a strange and wondrous cacophony in the room that one had to be there to believe it.
Encores of 'Hard Times Coffee Mill Girls' and a brilliantly realised set of jigs around the theme of the 'Lamented Gray Art Gallery' rounded off the evening.
Much has already been written of the harmonic and melodic combinations of Zena's striking deep voice, Julie-Ann's strong middle range and Judy Dinning's crystal and ethereal upper registers, but the combination of these vocals with the sweetest of instrumental backings is enough to make a grown woman weep. Men, characteristically, might be satisfied to accomodate a few private thrills and chills up and down the spine, and grudgingly admit that these 'thinking-man's Spice Girls' can really make exquisite music by themselves that is all their own.
