Image credit: Ben Hughes, The Glasshouse
Debuting a brand new series of variety shows at Gateshead’s Glasshouse, the Unthanks were warm and welcoming hosts for this feast of North East culture. Tim Dalling was hilarious and the RNS Quartet were predictably compelling, but it was Clara Mann’s devastatingly elegant songs that stole the show.
“We needed a good excuse to get a babysitter,” Becky Unthank tells the audience from the Glasshouse’s second stage. “We just wanted to make a night out that we’d want to go to,” her sister Rachel adds. Humility evidently runs in the family – this is in fact the grand opening night of a brand new monthly events series hosted by the sisters who, along with Adrian McNally, form the Unthanks, one of most well established and beloved contemporary folk acts in the North East. Friday Night Club aims to showcase a diverse range of artists from well beyond the world of music – think film screenings, poetry readings, perhaps a dance troupe (indeed, a merry band of Morris dancers click-clacking away in the Glasshouse’s atrium makes for a thoroughly entertaining interval act tonight). During their introduction, it’s McNally that seems most worried about whether this whole venture will work. “I hope you don’t think we’re trying to be wacky,” he says, before explaining that tonight’s various performers were carefully curated by the band.
If McNally was really worried about perceived ‘wackiness’, perhaps there were wiser bookings than Tim Dalling, a good old fashioned showman renowned for his gloriously kooky one man shows armed with an accordion. Dalling is a musician of many hats – three tonight, to be precise – and his condensed 25 minute set tonight is a wonder. One minute he’s trying his best to glamorise his Ayrshire birthplace with a raucous blues pastiche, the next he’s offering his earnest personal reflections about Buddhist teachings on morality in a sparse folk number. Then comes a song about ghouls and gremlins, delivered in a ludicrous full-face plant mask, equipped with leafy flaps that get in the way of Dalling’s microphone. It soon has the audience in hysterics, as does an overserious tale of a Famous Five-style family outing, but it’s his showstopper encouraging us to “just be nice!” in the face of the world’s calamities that lifts the heart most. It is thoroughly, wilfully clichéd, but you’d have to be a true cretin not to get swept up in the sheer joy of the final rowdy singalong.
Novelist Fiona Mozley is up next, and suddenly we’re at a book festival, Mozley sat on a high chair opposite Becky Unthank discussing the new play adaptation of her debut 2017 novel, Elmet. It’s a switch that one suspects might have lost the attention of audience members not previously invested in Mozley’s work, but more fool them: Elmet was selected for the Booker Prize shortlist no less, and Mozley has important things to say about the decline of common land in Britain and the creative process. Unthank makes for a perceptive and exceptionally well-informed interviewer – in fact, she’s working on the music for the new play version of Elmet – and Mozley’s reading of an extract describing a rural corner of Yorkshire is powerfully evocative.
Returning from the Morris dancer flash mob in the interval, the evening keeps serving surprises. Readers of this blog will know I have plenty of praise for the Glasshouse’s resident Royal Northern Sinfonia, and tonight a string quartet subset of the orchestra are on hand to zip through a deliciously crunchy rendition of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s String Quartet No.1. Fittingly, Finnish folk melodies occasionally bubble up to the surface amidst all the crunching chords and musical switchbacks, and cellist Daniel Hammersley is the standout player, his high vibrato waspish and insistent in the centre of it all.
This night, though, belongs to Clara Mann. The singer-songwriter initially strikes a bashful figure, shrinking back at the Unthanks’ admiring introduction of her, and apologising at one point for performing too many songs about her beloved Nissan Micra. But when Mann begins to sing, the room holds its breath. Her voice is elastic and featherlight, dancing through beautiful melodies and skipping over exquisitely gentle guitar playing. It’s peak Laura Marling with a few extra spoonfuls of melancholy, while Owen Spafford provides Punisher-era Phoebe Bridgers eeriness with ghostly violin playing and poignant banjo plucking. As Mann moves to a grand piano she seems to settle in to the set. The nervous chatter between songs fades to nothing, and all that remains is a parade of stunning songs.
Luckily the Unthanks return, saving us all from leaving the venue in tears, with a cheering group singalong finale. In fact, it all gets a bit Hootenanny, with all the performers back on stage to join us in singing the lilting sea shanty Padstow Farewell. Becky Unthank leads us out of the auditorium and we continue singing the words “It’s time to go now / Haul away your anchor” in front of bemused bar staff. It’s a poignant end to a night full a communal warmth and good cheer – a clear sign that Friday Night Club’s debut show has been a resounding success. Consider my faith in humanity well and truly restored.
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