Kate Rusby | 2 Reviews

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2 Reviews of Kate Rusby at The Derby Assembly Rooms – March 13. 2004

Version 1. Rejected as “too personal.”

“I mentioned ‘The Fairest of All Yarrow' once and I think I got away with it.”

Alex Ferguson was interviewed immediately after his team snatched an improbable victory from the back of the throat of defeat in the 1999 Champions League final. As even a lot of folk fans will realise, 0-1 down in the midst of stoppage time, they scored two sensational goals to lift the cup. He could summon up few words, but he managed these:

“Football, bloody hell,” he said.

So anyway, Kate Rusby and two of her three musicians came on to the stage to start the gig to Saturday night applause and announced ‘The Fairest of All Yarrow.' I felt as though I was about to drop into a dead faint. The people on the stage began to play, then the singer sang. It was sublime and was some sort of healing. The previous eighteen months passed across my mind. I wanted to laugh but settled for sitting there smiling inanely. I thought of Sir Alex.

“Music, bloody hell,” I said to myself.

At the beginning of September 2002 I sat down to write my first novel. Three weeks later I saw the Kate Rusby band. It wasn't so much a gig as a transformational event. A few days after that, I fixed the town of my story to a fictional northern ‘Yarrow.' A week later I went driving into Yorkshire looking for it. I found it in the first place I stopped my car. The story takes place at a school, so I went to find the town's single establishment of secondary education. As I turned into the school road, I was stopped in my tracks by the name of a turning to the right. ‘Sefton Close,' it said. The protagonist of my story, well, one of the two, is Sefton Demmler. “You're either a bloody fool,” I said, “or there's something funny going on.”

In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought a little later on. I would name the book, ‘The Fairest of All Yarrow.” I did love that song.

I saw the KRB again at Buxton a week or so later, confirming all my thoughts of the previous weeks and carried on writing. A lot of mornings when I started work I'd put on a Rusby album to conjure up Yorkshire and the right mood. I had no blocks, no problems. I just sat there, listened to music, and out the stuff came like water flowing down a hillside, or out of a drain. Whatever water it was, it flowed, until a couple of months later, the story was finished.

Then I had to go and complicate things.

Tell me, how many times have you thought to yourself, especially after a gig or a particularly enjoyable time listening to one of your favourite albums, ‘I'd love to go and talk to them, do an interview. Wouldn't that be great?' All the things you wanted to know about the music and the artist that you never got told in the press (if they actually got any media coverage, that is) you could find out. You'd be right there in the room with them. And how bad could that be? How great would that be? I've been a sucker for thinking like that for donkey's years.

And now, the donkey having grown up and more, I wear the clothes of the writer and think, well why shouldn't I do it? Why wait? Worse (or better), one of my closest buds spends whole chunks of his life interviewing every jazz star and superstar who blows through the capital city and has a whale of a time doing it. The pressure to try to start interviewing my heroes began to feel like a hand pressing down on a full bladder. And what about that book you've always wanted to write about songwriting?

I interviewed Andy Partridge of XTC down in Swindon . I was going down with flu at the time, and felt like death wasn't actually the worst essential element in the human condition, but it was still a day I'll remember always. So next, while I was figuring out a way to get to Paul McCartney in between setting down fiction, I would try the musical diamond I had recently uncovered: Kate Rusby.

So I contacted a folk magazine to see if they'd be interested in my writing an interview feature on Kate Rusby and, getting an encouraging response, I rang The Barnsley Organisation to try to arrange it. After a week or so of Um-ing, with some Ah-ing on the side, ‘Sorry, no,' came the reply.

This was not part of the plan. I couldn't remember Frank ever telling me of any jazzers turning him down. So why me? Immediately I was all self-recrimination. Was it something I said on the phone? Was there something in the tone of one of my emails that made them think, ‘Christ, the last thing we want to do is let that idiot anywhere near Kate and John.'

Dead end.

“She probably didn't want to do it, basically, because you're a twat,” said the supportive Francis. “She probably sensed it.”

“I didn't talk to her, I talked to her Dad.”

“Well, he probably sensed it then. Very sensitive to people, Yorkshiremen.”

“Being a Londoner, Frank, you should know,” I said.

“You're going into a sulk now, stop it.”

“Hmmph.”

“The trouble with you, Thomas, is you take everything personally.”

I saw the KR Trio in Darlington in the later 2003 winter and sulked all the way through it. I bought a trinket from the merchandise stall though, and who should serve me but none other than John McCusker; the brilliant JM (and husband of Kate). We exchanged words about the availability of his new album. “You remain the top man,” I said in tribute as he handed me my bag of paid-for goods. I am a sucker for meeting famous people. I met Jake Thackray on my 24 th birthday at one of his concerts and could hardly say a word, I was so nervous and awed.

Nonetheless, I continued to sulk and steadily refrained from listening to my Kate Rusby albums. Too painful. Meantime, I tried to interest agents in the completed ‘Yarrow' over the spring and summer of what is now last year. A few called for the manuscript, but no sale, just rejections. End of summer, dates for a new KRB tour emerge. I sulk things over and decide not to go. Dates for a John McCusker tour have already passed me by. I have intelligent friends. I am indeed nothing if not a bit of a twat.

The onset of autumn sees a huge new book opportunity and off I go, deep into that. Then Christmas comes : my daughter buys me Underneath the Stars , which eventually I play. It's excellent, of course. Hrrmph. But one morning I open the Derby Assembly mail shot and there is an advert for Kate Rusby Trio and enough is finally enough. I can be the moodiest bastard in all of Derbyshire, but having lost my nose to spite my face, there doesn't seem much point in starting on the ears as well.

March 13 th 2004. I sit in my seat and the musicians come out. Kate announces ‘The Fairest of All Yarrow' and I catch my breath in surprise. She starts to sing and my daughter, who knows the fictional Yarrow story and who is designing its cover, nudges me in the ribs. Two verses in and I can't stop myself from feeling simply bloody happy; the music is too, too beautiful; inexpressibly beautiful. I nudge Tasha back.

“This is my book,” I whisper, knowing this will make her laugh. She is one of the few who has read it and knows its love story that ends with a girl having sought a man into the arms of the fairest of my Yarrow.

I didn't need the rest of the concert. I could have left then and there, gone to some quiet corner, burst into tears for all the turmoil these five words had come to represent over the past year and a half, and moved on. It wouldn't quite have been the sociable thing to do though.

So the instruments played and the thoughts streamed through me: this song has become as much a part of me as my clothes, my books, my family life, my hands. Feeling bad about the interview or not, Kate Rusby is now part of my personal journey. She, fortunately, is so great an artist that she, her husband and Andy Cutting thawed away my stupid, self-indulgent ice. I began to see the amusing and ironic side of the thing now: the pointlessness of striving for personal glory; the selfishness in wanting to talk to your heroes, to put their lives, albeit professional ones, into words to be put on public display. The terrible thing here is that I had wanted to own a piece of the artist. I had known this all along, but it hadn't stopped me from behaving like a self-obsessed goon for more than a whole year. But then in addition to being a twat, I am a bad loser and always was.

The rest of the concert was exceptional. The choice of song, ‘The Cobblers Daughter,' ‘Some Tyrant,' ‘Falling' and ‘The Good Man,' among others, was exemplary, the standard of musicianship superlative and the humour between songs warm and much relished by the audience. The whole package, wrapped in Joe Rusby's wonderfully adept sound, was top drawer: the crowd lapped it up and almost roared for more. That's something for a Derby Assembly Rooms audience.

I am nothing if not a stubborn bastard, as well. I hatch a plan near the end of the first half. That extremely nice large publicity poster I saw on the way in (the urge to nick these has never left me since the days of Yes and Led Zeppelin and being 15) is fixed in my mind. I walk down the stairs to the foyer in the interval, quite prepared to lift it, but seeing a couple of officials, decide to ask for it instead. The Man says he'll keep it safe for me.

The house lights go up later. A word to my wife:

“I've got a job to do,” I say and I'm off down the stairs, scurrying through the exiting throng. The jobsworth hands me my booty and back I scuttle, through the happy crowd (‘scuse me, ‘scuse me, thank you') to the now already empty auditorium.

But not quite empty. On the stage is a tech unclipping mikes.

“Hello,” I cough, getting his attention, “is there any chance that I could get this poster signed by Kate?”

He looks at me.

“I'll go and ask her.”

He's back in a medium sized jiffy.

“She'll be up in a few minutes.”

I am pleased as hell. I am the sucker for meeting famous people after all, and this will never change. I will still be doing this when I am 80, I swear to God. I am too old now to be nervous. However, I'm still a little surprised not to feel my heart thumping waiting for Kate Rusby. I think about this a little and realise that I'm actually excited: I know what to say and I'm going to bust a gut not to talk like a burbling tart.

She walks briskly into view through the side-stage door only yards away and is heading straight towards me. I'm the only person with a poster and a pen in the vicinity so she must know that I'm the needy fan.

“I'm so sorry to bother you,” I say, and I mean it. It might be a pleasure for an artist to do this, or it might be an absolute bloody pain.

I forget what she replied with in that magnificent ‘the heroine is actually talking to me' moment. But I do remember this:

“I've brought a pen,” she says, smiling and leaning over the poster which I've laid out on the front of the stage.

I am grinning too, and feeling so good I would have happily lent her forty quid if she was short and asked me for it. But to business.

“It's for my daughter,” I say, and we sort out where she's going to sign and how to spell her name. Tasha's not Kate's. Kate Rusby writes, then she draws her own caricature head, and I watch her hand make the rapid movements required to shape the tight hair curls. I smile writing this now, thinking about her intense concentration as she worked.

The job is done. However, my business is still unfinished.

“I just want to say...” and we're looking at each other now, Kate's face open and expectant, reflecting mine, I think. I'm not nervous, but I am slightly in awe.

“...you said last year that this would be the last time you'd be playing ‘The Fairest of All Yarrow.'”

Kate nods.

“I just want to thank you for playing it again: I can't tell you why, because I'd only bore you to death, but I want to tell you how much it meant to me that you played it tonight.” I paused, absorbed now in my own drama.

“It meant such a lot.” I am desperate to tell her everything of course, but experience holds me safely in check.

Kate smiles broadly, looking quite pleased at this compliment, so I seem to have managed to carry this thing off successfully.

“I'm very glad, then,” she says.

“Not half as glad as me,” I say laughing, “thanks again.”

I say ‘goodbye,' transaction at last completed.

I walk away foolish grin happy, finally being able to associate Kate Rusby to my life in a totally positive way. I am in a dreamworld at this sense of closure, in fact.

Kate and I are finally even.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Version 2. Accepted.

Kate Rusby Live At the Derby Assembly Rooms, 13 March 2004

What with BBC Four screening a gig from the 2003 autumn tour recently and Underneath the Stars making a Radio 2 recommended list when it came out, all the world is getting closer to loving Kate Rusby. I understand (from a pal) that in Boston , Mass. that she's “all over the radio” at the weekends – on certain stations anyway. This isn't surprising, given her extraordinary recorded output to date: four solo records of high, high quality and a decade marker compilation of live cuts, a single and a chunk of re-recorded back highlights (an uncannily good collection when one considers what a naff idea it looks on paper). It's all beginning to take the shape of a serious body of work.

I was wondering on my way to this gig, like you do, about her being stuck in some kind of folk ghetto and whether it was the right thing. For her. For we Rusby aficionados. I was wondering too whether her live show is still a match for an artist who deserves a world-wide reputation as “one of the greats.”

I should state right away, that such judgements are hardly worthy of the music and what it appears the artist herself is trying to achieve. Guilt is attached to this sort of measurement thinking, because what strikes you on this occasion - the artist and her guitar with accordionist (Andy Cutting), bassist Kris Drever and husband fiddler/guitarist/whistler Andy McCusker - is the purity of her music and the occasion. Rank orders and critical placements jar terribly with it. Outside folk circles, I suppose purity is an overused word, one thrown away by critics for want of time or effort to think of more apt adjectives. In terms of traditional music however, the frequently successful search for authenticity, the patent sincerity of the intentions of the searcher and the abundant skill of so many players and vocalists negates this criticism, I would guess. So probably ‘purity' doesn't work here in a place where this quality is pretty much par for the course (though it works for me well enough).

The memory of the opening Fairest of All Yarrow alone is enough to blast sterile academic debate to pieces (author's note: this was originally ‘to buggery' and works much better for him than ‘pieces.'). It's a fabulous piece. Marry the odd time signature and sublime melody line to a delicious chord progression and the thing can't fail. Beauty and cleverness all rolled into one. I like the narrative too.

The absence of cliché throughout almost all of her now substantial canon is one of the keys to her maturing talent. In her writing and arrangements she uses well trodden cadences, but tried and trusted ones which in careful and expert hands always work: in C, say, the G to A minor, or the use of a chord II (E minor in the key of G), either finding its way to a predictable A or sliding up to a chord IV/C. She uses other intelligent tricks. Her guitar tunings render familiar chord movements almost appear strange upon the ear, or comfortably unusual. This helps especially when a traditional tune requires a step from a G chord to a home chord of C; at which point you're apt to be swept away by the band launching into their own melody line. With brother Joe always producing a lush, warm sound quality to the whole, such moments are often joyous in the live arena (and I don't use the j-word lightly). You're aware that this is not just the record you're listening to. The voice is mellifluous and lovely, but without these other features, the music would be sizeably diminished.

This point is, however is that the Rusby music has the voice as a major ‘weapon,' as well as the playing and the writing. There are still further layers to the composite explanation for its quality though. One is, I think, the collective personality of the singer and the musicians. Its unseen and to all intents and purposes unheard appeal comes from the human warmth and lack of pretension on the part of those who make the music. Alongside all the technical excellence is a complete open-ness; a ‘take us as you find us, this is what we are' which seems to leak out of the music and the concert presentation in a totally un-preconceived way. This is de rigeur for folk music events (I would guess), but it's still a remarkable quality across the spectrum of modern music.

The cheap side of this is the “Ower Kaite Fr'm Baarnsleh”-Six-o'clock-Sunday- Tea- Watching-Re-runs-O't' ‘ Last O' T' Summer Wine angle, a temptation for the media no doubt. This is part of the deal however. She is where she comes from. If she did ever take on airs and graces, I get the feeling that half the county would find her and her guitars and beat them both to a pulp in ten minutes flat. So analysing the Rusby voice is not a debate about technique, though she has that, pitching flawlessly and being able to reach intervals mid-syllable with a fine suppleness, but about character and geography. You hear this in the pronunciation of lyrics too, where the flat northern vowel sounds make words such as ‘loov' and ‘soomer' integral to the musical experience.

Without the particular sensibilities of the artist, however, you also would have a different voice and a different music altogether. Rusby's self-effacing jokes on the last tour about her predilection for miserable songs masks a large factor in her appeal. She is firmly reminiscent of Joni Mitchell one-step-removed, in taking on the role of the lost soul on the planet. Where Mitchell has been captivated throughout her long career with presenting herself as an eternal fool for exploitation in love, Rusby's muse seems increasingly to be on the bad place which is struggling to know how exactly one fits into the scheme of things. The pull of the melancholy state probably explains her choice of songs which have become magnificent pearls littering her career: I Wonder What Is Keeping My True Love, The Sleepless Sailor , Let The Cold Wind Blow, Who Will Sing Me Lullabies, My Young Man and The Maid Of Llanwellyn ( a song I would happily earn the right to listen to once a week by selling all of my older relations) . It might explain also the lunar attraction of the sea song - many of which she is singing on this tour (or rather now ‘sung') - with all those images of the restless ocean, the sad, rhythmical wash of the waves and tide, the loneliness of its sound, its distance. Apologising for the domination of them in the first part of the set (around the time she sang Polly) she proceeded, perhaps without realising it to move smoothly straight into another one.

It also accounts for the fact that upbeat songs that would be merely and harmlessly pleasant in other hands sound wistful and deep in hers: The Wild Goose, Yarrow and Bold Riley, for example. Even exuberant narratives of mischief or adventure, come out the other side of the Rusby treatment sounding like philosophical treatises. I'm thinking here of Sir Eglamore and William And Davy and The Good Man which was a real highlight here (the only mistake she ever makes is to take on songs of misery like I Wonder Who Is Keeping My Love Tonight and Annan Waters and I Am Stretched Out On Your Grave that become suffused in such a darkness they become unlistenable wrist-cutters).

In the end, your voice is also the sound God gives you plus the sum of all the music you ever listened to, especially the stuff you have loved. Great voices all have an indefinable quality in them, whether it's Louis Armstrong, James Taylor or John Lennon, that belongs to them and them only. Whether Rusby's voice is ‘great' or not, it is unutterably Kate, a sound identifiable by a striking clarity and softness, especially attractive when she ascends to falsetto notes. It has something else too, something decidedly firmer and resolute, otherwise it would be drowned by the strength of technique and personality of the great players she is constantly surrounded by.

So a Rusby show, what can I tell you: you get all of this, so it's great, even without the dazzling leadership of Ian Carr. It's one big treat alright, especially as this year the artist herself seems to be more relaxed than the previous 2002/03 tours either side of Christmas. The humour wedged between the songs was even in danger of reaching of Connelly and Thackray proportions from days now long gone past, so relaxed is Ms Rusby. Even the old favourites from last season (“How do you sell a Yorkshireman double glazing........”) made me laugh. Here husband McCusker makes his presence felt in so small measure, a genuine and humorous gentleman for sure. By the time the splendid Andy Cutting, more or less on home territory here in Derby, has got involved, confiding a couple of confident recipes to us all, you might as well be re-naming the show ‘An Evening With Kate Rusby And Friends' and not feeling as though you've been had at some revolting end of the pier show. And just when the stage craft is in danger of tipping over into the mannered, the music pulls it back from the edge, as Kate carefully peels off a peerless ballad such as Some Tyrant or Falling (I thank her for not including Bring Me A Boat : I'm so in love with this song, hearing it live might precipitate the collapse of my whole nervous system) .

Brother Joe at the desk does a great job too, showcasing the voice and the instruments in a warm, natural sound. It's beautifully balanced, too. This could be said for the whole event. The obligatory instrumental showcase which sees the singer exit for the best part of ten minutes is a startling piece of self-effacement in anyone's language, as is the space allowed Kris Drever's splendidly sung ballad in the second half. I've come to admire too the way Kate takes the risk of leaving the stage to a bravura display of virtuoso folk playing each time she takes her leave. I'm not sure I'd have the bottle. The medley on this tour comprises four pieces, comprising two tracks from McCusker's last solo album Goodnight Ginger, and builds from a slow, almost sensuous melody to a full on reel. Drever ditches the bass for an acoustic guitar for this segment, and I couldn't help noticing some grimacing that wouldn't have disgraced a rock axe-wielder. Fair play to you for being so into the music, I thought, before noticing my own non-statement. The trio of players here are so absorbed in what they're doing it's almost as much of a joy gazing at their enthusiasm as it is to hear the music which was, as it always is, stunning.

Further variety is added by the second half opening with a couple of tunes solo-Kate. On her own she's still very fine, but her playing is a little too self-effacing. When the spotlight shines on the one, he or she benefits from a complete letting go. Usually, the sizeable dollop of ego that it takes just to be there enables the artist to sing their song with complete conviction. Rusby's complete lack of arrogance and self-regard then doesn't show off her talent to best effect, not yet at least. She sings always beautifully but if any soul-baring is going on, there's a diffidence which prevents some seriously painful narratives, personal and otherwise, becoming studies of searing pain as they might in the lap of perhaps June Tabor.

Not that I'm complaining. Hear her singing a piece like I Courted a Sailor and the music just comes off the stage and enfolds you. This might be suggestive of a feminine experience, or a romantic one, but it isn't. The songs might all be love songs, or songs of personal longing, but somehow there's nothing prim, prissy or cissy about them. The performing of one might represent Kate Rusby launching a little (or sizeable) object of beauty into the world each time but the bloke is no more immune that the female to their wiles. Perhaps the fact that she surrounds herself almost entirely with testosterone on the concert stage as well as in the studio creates a perfect balance – a harmony, if you will. Or else the writer here is full of baloney and the pull of Kate's music has much to do with the eternal call of the woman to the man in song, each with their separate longing. Perhaps it's both.

Whatever the exact attraction, the Derby Saturday night crowd absolutely loved it. Going out on a solo rendition of Underneath the Stars , bathed in blobs of light as she sang another of her own quiet paens of self-doubt, they roared in pleasure for more. On the receiving end of such a display of warmth, humour and world class music, even the polite middle-classes of southern Derbyshire couldn't hold back. It was something like this good in the ears of others too.