Seventh time Laucky

Venue:

St. George’s, Bristol

Date: 20/10/2022

Lau at St George’s, Bristol – October 20th 2022 8:00pm to 10:30pm with a 20 minute interval.

A few years back someone gave me a little album called ‘Race The Loser’, casually describing it as a ‘folk’ album that they thought I’d appreciate. At the time, immersed in American and British Bluegrass and boxed sets of live gigs from Yes, it got shelved and mentally compartmentalised as ‘must listen to later – will probably be really good ‘cos Martin said so’.

It remained unplayed for quite some time, until I noticed that the band were on tour and coming to my favourite venue, St. Georges in Bristol. Giving it a quick spin to see what it promised, I was pretty astonished to hear what came across as ‘folk’ of a kind, but not quite what I’d expected. I was taken particularly by a track called ‘Torsa’ and another called ‘Far From Portland’ that took things to an exciting place where East Of Eden nodded to Larks Tongues and waved at the spirit of Martyn Bennett. What? Whaaaaat? No woolly jumpers here. Fingers not in lugs. The band was Lau.

So, I bought a ticket to the gig. Then I got a foul cold two days before the gig and had to miss it in a spirit of not wishing to infect anyone with a howler of a snotfest. Gutted. A few months passed, and they announced another visit to St. Georges. Spirits rose, tickets were purchased and pinned to the noticeboard. ‘Race The Loser’ continued to get played and greatly enjoyed, and my anticipation for the gig steadily grew. A week before the gig I buggered up my foot and couldn’t walk. The tickets were given away. Jokingly, I told friends that I thought this was a sign that I’d never get to hear the guys play; an omen of my absence from their live appearances.

Consider my joy, then, when I saw yet another appearance at St. Georges hove into view on the tour guides – Wednesday 3rd June 2020 went into my diary with a great sense of relief. I’d still not ventured beyond the one album, wanting to hear them play live so that if I did buy more, the memory of their live performance would be there to bolster what they’d managed to capture on a disc.

And then. Wednesday 3rd June 2020 was clobbered by Covid. The gig was rescheduled for November 3rd the same year, in the hope that the plague might fade. Alas, ‘twas not to be, and a second re-schedule to 24th June the following year delayed gratification again. Too optimistic, and a third re-schedule took the promise of exploratory pleasure on to the 17th day of February 2022, when some utterly selfish member of the band went and got himself infected with the bloody bug. And so it was that the fourth re-schedule landed on October 20th 2022 – the fifth allotted date that would try to break the jinx for this particular gig on this particular tour, and the seventh (SEVENTH!) date upon which I had tried to see them play, thus far sans success.

Along the way through these repeated re-schedules, I’d invested in a copy of ‘The Bell That Never Rang’, and in so doing I had discovered that the band’s horizons were expanded in a delightfully progressive (Yes! Progfolk!) direction beyond the previous album. So, even more intrigued to discover what we might be about to hear, it was with some trepidation that we drove into Bristol last Thursday night to try to finally see Lau perform. I fully expected a wheel to fall off the Foxmobile, or a meteorite to plummet onto Park Street just as we got there, but luckily the Gods of Laulessness were asleep and we finally took our seats in a sold out house for the forthcoming revelation.

If you’ve read this far I’m guessing you either know the band’s canon better than I, or you are similarly intrigued by a band that have won an embarrassing number of folk awards, garnering a pile of praise over the years. It was a show of two halves. The first half started with an apology from Martin Green, “Er, sorry about that, thanks for waiting, we’re two and half years late getting here. Kris was taking a shower and things just got out of hand.” Straight away we then got a serious demonstration of instrumental chops, musical quality at the top flight of acoustic artistry. This effectively told me, ‘look, we can really, really play, so judge any shenanigans you might hear over the coming hour or two in the knowledge that we are experimenting and exploring here for fun and effect, not to compensate for a chops shortage’.

Kris Drever’s fine voice is to the fore on a couple of songs, and his guitar, a small thing with a mighty voice – using a bass octave I think? – beautifully courses through the evening, the set is equally deftly driven by Aidan O’Rourke, who’s bowing technique is breathtakingly fine, but who is similarly skilled when hammering out double string pulses to provide rhythmic propulsion (there’s likely a technical name for this, but it escapes me). And then there is Martin Green, accordionist extraordinary, who, in his most alarming moments, appears to be a man fighting with a large octopus, trying to cram it into a struggling shoebox that is itself wriggling to escape his grasp.

All this and some fine songs that are recognisably folk music. There were some hints of experimentation in the first half, with rollicking extended interludes, the rise and fall of song crescendos and moments of exquisite detail, all brought to a flourish as they finished for the interval, the crowd enthralled.

A swift break and then in the second set we get to see and hear what these guys are capable of when they decide to really push the envelope. Tape effects. Off stage voices. Metronomes. Heartfelt songs. Hand-held drones played in pairs into vocal mikes set up on the front of the stage. Frenzied instrumental passages. Beautiful instrumental interludes in haunting songs. The lot. It was a terrific, mesmeric performance, and all over far too soon, though the band played well into the evening; I got to hear several songs from the albums I own, and bought two more on the way out, from the merch table.

If you love wonderful playing, love fabulous, sometimes lyrically tough songs, if you love experimental developments of the possibilities for an instrumental trio, if you come from a place that values folk songs old and new, if you have a heart that is gladdened by hearing accomplished musicians take their craft in new and exciting directions while paying attentive respect to the roots of their music, go see them.

The audience:

The usual St. George’s lot, particularly the regular Lau lot at St. George’s, judging by the reception they gave the band, and the obvious genuine affection that the band have for the venue.

It made me think..

They are bloody marvellous.

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