To celebrate their 20 years together as a band, folk superstars the Unthanks played not one but two UK tours. Late last year they visited 19 intimate venues, many of them harking back to their very beginning. Then in January they played four big halls in just four intense days.
My mouse finger was quick off the mark when the tickets went on sale and I bagged front-row seats for both London dates on the tours. And the two shows could not have been more different. In early November they played the tiny picture gallery of the Foundling Museum near Kings Cross (capacity 50) as a four-piece with just piano, fiddle and a squeeze or two of harmonium. In contrast, on the last day of January at the Barbican Hall (capacity almost 2,000) their expanded seven-piece line-up was surrounded by the 37-piece Royal Northern Sinfonia. It’s a testament to the depth and variety of the Unthanks’ repertoire of folk interpretations and band originals that the two set lists had only two songs in common.
The sold-out Barbican show came as a triumphant finale after dates in Glasgow, Gateshead and Manchester. As a fan who attends their annual “Sing With The Unthanks” weekends in the countryside of north-east England, I may be biased in their favour, but the waves of melody, harmony and sheer musical invention flowing from the stage only reaffirmed my devotion. We were so surprised when three front-row seats to our left and two to our right stayed empty all night. Those no-show folks missed an unrepeatable delight.
Choosing the date for their 20th anniversary must have been tricky because singers Rachel and Becky – daughters of Northumberland folk veteran George Unthank of The Keelers – released their first album in 2004 under the name Rachel Unthank and the Winterset. They became The Unthanks later after Rachel’s then-husband and band manager Adrian McNally joined on piano with his childhood pal Christopher Price adding guitar and bass. The core five-piece is completed by fiddle-player Niopha Keegan, who is the third voice in their heavenly harmonies.
Augmented by regular guests Martin Douglas on drums and Lizzie Jones on trumpet, the band were locked in tight formation with the Gateshead-based Sinfonia, Britain’s only full-time chamber orchestra. Conductor Ellie Slorach was an energetic and inspiring presence on a low podium between the two sisters. On a few numbers the screens on either side of the huge Barbican stage lit up with animated videos illustrating the songs.
Kicking off with the slow-burning Shetlands ballad ‘The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry’, the set ranged as far back as the chilling ‘Felton Lonnin’ (a Northumbrian dialect song recorded on the Winterset album “The Bairns” in 2007) to ‘The Snow It Melts The Soonest’ from their 2024 release “The Unthanks In Winter”. There were four numbers from 2015’s “Mount The Air” to celebrate 10 years since it won BBC Radio 2 Folk Album of the Year. Its 10-minute title track closed the first half of the set and they reprised the ending with even more oomph for a brief but dazzling encore.
The prevailing mood in Unthanks music is one of achingly beautiful melancholy. I think that’s why I love them so much. This was reflected in the song choices but there are always exceptions. A favourite moment is when the elegantly dressed sisters swap their ladylike heels for big clomping boots and show off their clog-dancing skills. This time the change came just before the interval and their clogs stayed on throughout the second set.
Band members came and went as needed. On the Lal Waterson cover ‘At First She Starts’, Becky was the only Unthank on stage, singing solo with the orchestra. Hers is a unique voice that seems to carry its own built-in harmony. I once asked her about this and she said she’d been told the same thing before, but had never tried to analyse it. “It’s just what comes out of my mouth when I sing!” she told me.
During the show, bandleader McNally stopped to recall their very first London gig. Two weeks in advance he had travelled south with a satchel full of flyers to hand out during Folk Britannia, a weekend-long event at the Barbican in 2006. “I kept getting thrown out by security, but I would just sneak back in,” he said. “All weekend they were going, ‘It’s him again!’ But it worked – our Bush Hall show was sold out and the rest is history.” He praised “the leadership and the grace” of Ellie Slorach in bringing the orchestral tour to successful fruition. Beaming with delight, the conductor paid her own tribute to The Unthanks, saying everyone had worked together to overcome the challenges of blending folk – “a form of music mostly not written down” – with classical – “a form of music almost all written down.”
It had been hugely rewarding and was over all too soon. Rachel Unthank gave credit for the ambitious arrangements to McNally (they are amicably divorced), telling us how “all of this beautiful music basically just came out of his head”. Becky introduced the end of the show. “Here’s a song about a pigeon,” she joked as Lizzie Jones stepped forward to play the plaintive trumpet opening to ‘The King of Rome’. This epically moving song is guaranteed to make Unthanks fans well up. The true story of a storm-hit pigeon race from Italy to Derby, it was written in the 1980s by Derby’s own Dave Sudbury and then quickly picked up as a folk scene favourite. June Tabor’s was the best-known of many covers until The Unthanks made it their own thanks to a live recording with the Brighouse and Rastrick Band released in 2012. With the full might of the Sinfonia’s strings and woodwind augmenting that original brass band arrangement, we really were “lifted up on shining wings” just like the lyrics say. It was nothing short of magnificent.
It’s worth pointing out in closing that the Unthanks have a policy of keeping their ticket prices remarkably low – our front-row Barbican seats cost only £35 each. For anyone else of their stature you’d expect to pay double that or more. It’s a brave stand to take in an era when musicians earn nearly all of their income from live shows and very little from sales and streaming. I topped up our payment with a website donation and hope anyone else who could afford it did the same.
