For Brighton-based folkies like me, it’s exciting to see that the little venue upstairs at the strangely shaped Quadrant pub is now called The Folklore Rooms. A name doesn’t dictate everything about what a venue hosts, of course, but it’s heartening to see the word emblazoned across the wall, alongside a covering of what feels like genre-appropriate fauna.
My first experience of the venue in this form comes in seeing Nick Hart. All three of his albums have ‘English folk songs’ in the title, so it seems appropriate. And English folk songs we get. Hart opens with The Press Gang, sinister and severe with its reports of lashings with “a tar-covered strand”. He continues, bleakly, with a (hypnotically absorbing) take on Sam Hall, concerning a prisoner’s pre-gallows confession.
Not that Hart is mirthless – far from it. His dry sense of humour – which comes through in his delivery, as well as his between-song manner – counterbalances the grim subject matter. But it also somehow ironises more cheerful material: the chuckles generated by the “implied rhyme” for ‘frolics’ in The Molecatcher feel different, somehow. “You can sing along,” he drolly tells us as the chorus approaches, “but I understand if you don’t want to.”
Hart, a warm and characterful singer, credits his approach to guitar-playing to Chris Wood – and you can hear the through-line to Martin Carthy as well. But he has a magic of his own, lending a propulsive energy to a version of Lord Bateman. Riding Down To Portsmouth (learned from the singing of Brighton’s own Mary Ann Haynes) is sweet and melancholy, while he also conjures some of the weirdness within Dives and Lazarus (as does his remarkable video for the track, below).
There are surprises in store, too: a gripping, rarely sung Robin Hood ballad, which makes their apparent unpopularity even more curious. Hart performs a Norwegian translation of an American hymn – absolutely beautifully. He weighs up leaving that version behind and committing to only singing his English re-translation in future, and while I’m keen to hear that, I feel sorry for future audiences not getting to hear the Scandi take.
Hart also offers up an original song, about which he is nervous: it’s a tribute to friends helping him through a hard time, and he makes himself vulnerable with his introduction to it, which concludes: “Sorry if it’s shit.” It isn’t. Rather it’s literate, tender and – of course – wryly witty. Another string to an already deeply impressive bow.
Once again I have managed to non-helpfully review the last gig of someone’s tour. It’s not my fault people keep wrapping things in Brighton! Keep an eye on Nick Hart’s shows page, here, in any case
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