Walking through the icy rain in Hackney towards The Round Chapel, one comforting thought was that this was going to be the best of times – Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman are top-notch Old Time players of banjo and fiddle, and put in not such a poor showing on guitar as well. And the Round Chapel is a beautiful venue with, naturally, great acoustics – even if, as Nora Brown would observe, one could lose oneself in the beauty and just spend the evening staring at the ceiling. It’s a sizable step-up from the previous time this writer had caught the duo in London – that had been at the Green Note, a venue with a capacity roughly one-sixteenth of the Round Chapel. It was going to be the best of times – and it was. Unfortunately, it was also the coldest of times, with Winter having arrived earlier in the week, it felt sub-zero with the rain and wind chill, and since there was no heating in the venue, it didn’t feel much different inside. It’s understood that times are tight, but the ticket price had been pretty low, and it’s hard to believe that many in the sold-out venue wouldn’t have chipped in 50p or a £1 to a heating collection – £400 could surely have been enough to knock the thermostat a little higher for a couple of hours? Instead, there was the unusual sight of a venue full of coat and hat and glove-wearing americana music fans.
Not that any of this really mattered once Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman took the stage for their first set of the evening. Nora Brown plays mostly Old Time style banjo – sometimes a two-finger picking technique, sometimes clawhammer and sometimes something in-between and with most of the left hand work happening in the top 5 frets – and guitar, whilst Stephanie Coleman is best known as a fiddle player, but also contributes on the guitar from time to time. Their opening pair of songs – ‘Across The Rocky Mountain‘ which segued straight into ‘Blue Bonnet‘ – laid down the mark for the evening with Brown contributing the majority of the vocals and Coleman, for the most part, harmonising. Nora Brown’s singing is a hard thing to get a grasp on – it seems to come from a very distant place, both in time and space, it’s clear but often very quiet, and it can feel as if the words are coming to her for the very first time, organically emerging in response to the playing. It’s quite mesmerising. A fine example of this was a version of ‘John Riley’ with Brown playing banjo and singing just responses to the questions of how she would react to the loss of her true love – the words are there to help frame the tune, but the feeling that comes across is that it is the instrumental playing that is – and should be – the focus. It’s strange, but also very pleasing.
Not that everything is very serious – there was some uncertainty whether ‘Feeing Day‘ was an old song or a cover of something by Jake Xerxes Fussell – Brown’s final decision being “it’s one he does a lot anyway.” And when Brown removes her hat – surely indicating that it must have been warmer on the stage – Coleman decried that “we don’t match anymore.”
A highlight of the pair’s first set was ‘Black Jack Davey‘, which took on an eerie glamour from Brown’s repeated singing of particular lines – “I’ll be sixteen come Sunday” repeated half a dozen times serves to emphasise what a different time the song comes from, particularly since the young woman is already a married mother. And then there was ‘Sally Ann’, which contrived to have so few words that these served only to set the scene for Coleman’s hottest fiddle playing of the evening thus far.
Returning after a short interval for another stint of exemplary playing, there was an opportunity to demonstrate a mastery of harmonics played way up the banjo necks on the opening tune, followed by what has become a calling card for the duo – the moonshine mystery of ‘Copper Kettle‘ with both voices intertwining beautifully. This contrasted well with the almost jaunty ‘Oh My Little Darling‘, which saw Coleman both leading the vocals and switching to guitar, with Brown on a large-bodied mandolin. Really, though, it is when they are playing instrumental parts that the magic shines the brightest – there’s such intense concentration as when on, say ‘ Lady of the Lake‘, one or other of the pair leads the direction, and it really is magical, that wonderful, timeless combination of fiddle and banjo in particular.
There was quite the hopeful hint for future UK gigs – Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman may have been heading off for a short tour through what remained of November, but their comments that “this is the place to play Old Time Music” and that they had so many friends in the UK who also play in the same style makes hopes for a quick return not at all far fetched.
Spitzer Space Telescope, who opened the evening, is Dan MacDonald, and he wandered on stage playing his banjo and singing ‘Hard Luck Johnny‘ with its parade of unlucky events suffered by an eternally suffering sailor. It sounds very traditional – but like all of his songs, it is an original, albeit leaning heavily into the early Sixties stylings of the Clancy Brothers.
With the banjo quickly set aside, that Clancy-esque character continued through songs such as ‘Rovin’ Is me Pleasure‘ – rovin’ and ramblin’ being particular concerns of singers of that earlier era, for no little part because of the opportunity to get a sing-along on the chorus. Something that, sadly, was just not going to happen on this night.
For Spitzer Space Telescope it’s often life that provides the inspiration for a song – ‘High Grow The Hedgerows‘ recalls a visit to the Falmouth Sea Shanty Festival in 2016, where one of his companions chose to sleep out in a cider apple orchard, whilst ‘West Virginia Fair‘ tells of the joys of a first visit to an Old Time music festival. As well as bawling out his songs at full shanty power, Spitzer Space Telescope can bring things down to a sotto voce whisper, and either way, he’ll probably be whipping his head from side to side as he sings. And he’s a joker – berating late comers for missing the best bit. With his dedication to the Clancy style, and with songs heavy with a “too-raa-too” or a “ta-da-da-dat-ditty-da“, it seems almost sacrilegious to not be sitting there nursing a Guinness and joining in where one can – and whilst the set went down well in this large room, it’d probably be hilariously enjoyable in a smaller folk club setting.
