49 f
something to focus my musical vocabulary on and I think we have a perfect relation- ship. If I have any musical ability it comes from not being a player but as a listener. That’s my greatest body of experience. I grew up with huge amounts of music thrown at me as a kid and my enthusiasm has never waned, so vocabulary is very strong and that’s where I get ideas from.”
“I
The heart of the band remains the voic- es of Rachel and Becky Unthank. They grew up singing together and remain irretrievably entwined with the spirit of the North East folk tradition. The fabled unaccompanied album they’ve been planning for years may actually be crawling closer.
“Me and Becky have always sung together unaccompanied,” says Rachel. “For us that was where it started when we were really young and if we wanted to be in a session it was a comfort to be singing together and hiding behind each other. Then it became an essential part of our rela- tionship. When I went to university we still sang harmonies down the phone to one other. You can’t do that now on mobiles because there’s a slight delay – it’s rubbish! And singing with Niopha (fiddle player Nio- pha Keegan) is great. She has such a beauti- ful voice and adds so much more texture.”
“We did this festival in Drogheda in Ire- land with the Voice Squad and were in awe
was a two-bit musician who’d pretty much given up playing and performing when we met and I found my muse in them in the sense of giving me
of them. We grew up listening to them and their harmonies are so perfect, so pure and beautiful. That gave us an extra kick to do more stuff together. It’s a core part of the sound; it’s who we are.”
A bit of a change from singing with the Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band, with whom in 2012 they produced the BBC Folk Awards’ single most spine-tingling moment perform- ing Dave Sudbury’s glorious life-affirming song about pigeons, King Of Rome. So what’s it like singing in front of a brass band, Rachel?
“Totally awesome! The power almost
blasts you offstage and it’s amazing to feel so close to it. They hold back when we’re singing and then they go for it and it feels like the force of it is going to lift you off the stage. It was a bit nerve-wracking singing King Of Rome with June Tabor there, because her rendition of it is wonderful. That song has everything. It’s mournful, hopeful and uplifting. Singing with the brass band is something we’ll treasure forever.”
They regard their Singing Weekends as a way of maintaining their love of folk tra- dition. “We love performing, it’s a privi- lege. But when we’re away we miss things like getting together in the pub with our friends and having a good sing. On our Singing Weekends we like to embrace all those things we miss, the good feeling you have from getting together and singing with other people when we’d look forward to key points in the year. Like Boxing Day. My dad was in Redcar Sword Dancers and they revived a mummers play at Greatham, near Hartlepool.
there and the singing was immense. The harmonies made your hairs stand on end, so vital and exciting. We looked forward to that day all year. Singing can have so many forms and functions. Just because we sing lots of miserable songs doesn’t mean we don’t love singing loud things. We’re just not very good at it on our own.”
“A
And they see no contradiction in adding Robert Wyatt, Antony & The John- sons, Nick Drake, King Crimson or even Miles Davis into the mix…
“It’s not an issue,” says McNally. “We
don’t see a line to cross. We don’t know why a line should exist. By now it should be clear that our love for traditional music is our main love and our tenderness for it is far greater than any desire to innovate with it. A lot of what is regarded as folk music now is out there because it is played on folk instruments, but if you listen to the content it is just pop or rock music and completely devoid of any- thing you could regard as folk music.”
“Who cares what it’s played on? What matters most is what it means and how it is played, not what it is played on. The corner- stone of our approach to the tradition is that the love is in the content and not in the style. We will go where the songs take us in our own musical vocabulary – our commit- ment is to the songs and tunes themselves.” F
www.the-unthanks.com
fter the dance we’d always go to the pub and sing with my dad and his friends and people like The Wilsons were often
Photo: Pip April
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