With a storm behind us and the promise of snow in the near future, it was clear that we’re heading towards the Winter, a time of chill that drives a need for the embracing of the “cosy”, a time when the chill can provide crystalline clarity but also can mistily obscure. What better time, then, for the delicate, intricate folksong of Natalie Wildgoose? The Londoner, with strong connections to Yorkshire, has been on something of a journey in her music, with her recent EP “Come Into the Garden” showing that the current direction is towards an extreme of stripped-back simplicity, having started a few years ago from a more regular-sounding modern folk sensibility. A current activity is to find interesting rooms with pianos – a church hall, perhaps, or, better yet, a church, and then record with whatever ambient sounds and whatever piano quality is available. It gives Natalie Wildgoose’s music the feel of field recordings – which in effect, of course, they are – and this in turn is a wonderful match to her high, clear vocals. The combination is singularly distinctive, and if one was going to try and recreate this live, one could do worse than pick the beautiful small St. Pancras Old Church.
With a guitar player and two vocal accompanists, Wildgoose took up a position at the piano, in a rather poorly lit part of the chancel, starting her set with the delicate love song ‘Blackberries‘ which swells with a constrained longing “don’t want a life of sin” she sings, before adding “don’t want a life without him.”
Wildgoose’s songs come from a place of real emotions – the haunting ‘In The North‘ was inspired by reflections inspired by the passing of her Yorkshire Grandfather, and the realisation that he lingered in the heather and the streams of the moorlands. Whilst it could seem that Wildgoose is some moorland trekking reincarnation of Cathy Earnshaw, she confided that she had been to University around the corner from this venue and had often passed it with the wish to someday play there. If that made the evening special for her, then her songs are equally special – the newly written, never-before-played-live, ‘Nobody on the Path‘ had been recorded the previous week in a bothy. It invokes an empty path with just wind and bird song – but this is not loneliness, it is just the peace of being alone – quite a different thing.
An a cappella ‘Silver Dagger‘ brought the trio of voices to the front of the stage with Wildgoose suggesting that we “might know the Joan Baez version.” Well, yes – but this was very different, and to be totally honest, was slightly ropey in places, but it reminded Wildgoose of when the three women had first sung this way during a Covid lockdown when they were not allowed to gather together and play instruments.
Returning to the shadows by the piano, Wildgoose again tapped her most recent release “Come Into The Garden” for the beautifully speculative ‘Angel‘ which gently questions a lover about “this whole business of what is reality and what is love” and in a quiet acceptance concludes it doesn’t matter. A short song, but a simply beautiful one, sung with a tremulous clarity. The finale is the new EP’s title song, which half-references ‘Come into the Garden Maud‘ but adds its own version of Victorian starched white English lieder. St. Pancras Old Church may not be such a large room, but it was brought to a breathless silence.
And that was it – a single-digit long set list, of some forty-five minutes, and no encore. Brief, but in its stripped back simplicity, a really satisfying gig – every quiet note, every softly sung syllable an entrancing musical joy.
The evening had got underway with a set from Elanor Moss, who cradles her Martin guitar at a thirty-degree angle to the vertical and sings songs of loss in love to a delicate finger-picked accompaniment. ‘Again My Love‘ is a break-up song which sees the narrator observing what might be yet another affair ending, or possibly it’s the same repeated on-again-off-again parting. Whichever, it’s shot through with melancholy and weariness.
Her songs on this evening leant into relationships which, it would seem, were not working so well – with imagery of knives and needles, of an inability to give a partner all that they, materially, want “but I can’t make my rent” she sang wistfully.
Although it takes a lot of tuning in, and then back out again, to get to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Cactus Tree‘ it’s an effort that is worth it as Moss proffers a perfect version of the gently self-mocking song that tells of a string of lovers and a woman who “will love them when she sees them/they will lose her if they follow / and she only means to please them / and her heart is full and hollow.” It sits well alongside Moss’ own music, which included ‘Louise‘ – a “song for mothers and daughters really” which will be on Moss’ debut album next year.
