New Music 2015 - Part 1 - Leveret - New Anything

I decided that my consideration of Music Lists 2014 should be punctuated by other posts, especially those concerning that which is forthcoming in 2015.

At the very end of September I wrote a post that really should have been the first 'New Music' post dated 2015. At that time of year the whole idea felt premature but, now we are into December 2014, it does so no longer.

The band Leveret is new - the début LP 'New Anything' is released (in the UK at least) on 26 January 2015. The members of the trio are not new and are all astounding musicians in their own right and between them have worked with almost everyone folk-famous in the last twenty years...
Andy Cutting is a melodeon player of the highest order and fame, possibly even more renowned on that instrument than John Spiers of Bellowhead. That connection is real however, for Sam Sweeney is a fiddle player of repute and indeed a bona fide member of Bellowhead. The line up is completed by Robert Harbron, a multi-instrumentalist just possibly best known for playing the concertina.
I know that many people hate the family of "squeeze-box" instruments (piano accordion in particular) with a passion that I would only reserve for rice pudding with pineapple chunks stirred in to it. I am not one of them and Leveret is just the kind of band I want to see live.

It doesn't look like this will be a problem on 20 February 2015.

Live in Frome - Chantel McGregor

It is now much tidier and no longer weed-overgrown as it appears in this picture, which is obviously a good thing, but would you have suspected that it is as well as a Grade 1 listed building and after 251 years in use as a non-conformist chapel, and subsequently the better part of fifty years quietly decaying, now an arts venue, including live music whilst also home to a thriving architectural practice?

It is a bit much to ask, I know, but it is true. Maybe it was meant to be slightly forbidding.

Whether that is true I can't say but it is still formidable, not least because it is a very intimate venue indeed. There are no corners in which to hide and that applies as much to the audience as to the artists. I still wonder, however what the founders and subscribers for the building, when Frome was a town very rich indeed on the wool trade, would make of it all now. I'd like to think, as in their time they were forward-looking and sometimes almost to the point of revolution, they could see the positive side of it all. It might have been a challenge...

Rock four-piece Albany Down kicked things off with a solid set only marginally disrupted by some issues with the lead vocalist's mike and associated lead that were soon sorted out. Two albums, 'South of The City' and 'Not Over Yet' notwithstanding, these things can happen to anyone at any time and so here is Albany Down, live at Rook Lane Chapel Frome.

A great deal of stuff on one of the shallowest stages, which is why the monitors are actually placed on chairs in front of the stage and barely out of the way of the legs of those in the front row of the audience. Sometimes the publicity says "intimate gig" and this was that and then some.  There were a number of memorable tracks, all their own, and some fine guitar moments too.

On another day they could have been headlining and almost everyone, myself included, would have gone home happy but it was not to be one of those days.
This is where I started to wonder really what those wealthy subscribers, who paid for the building of this edifice over three centuries ago, might be thinking.
Not only is it being used for wicked enjoyment. This happened: Chantel McGregor...

"Tis a Wednesday evening; you should be a-busy weaving."

It only got better after that: this is after all an artist who only the previous day (and the first day of this tour) had not only been nominated in the short-list for 'Best Female Vocalist' by The British Blues Awards 2013 (an award she won in 2012) but also in the short-list for 'Best Guitarist' and the first time a female artist has ever been nominated in the category.

You might even have got the impression that she was thoroughly enjoying herself and, with music and the faultless backing of Richard Ritchie (bass) and Keith McPartlin (percussion), who can blame her.

Towards the middle of the set she played and sang three songs, all cover versions, solo:

• Rhiannon ( Stevie Nicks)
• I Can't Make You Love Me (Bonnie Raitt)
• Nothing Else Matters (Metallica)

That is not to say that the many tracks from the album 'Like No Other' were not equally noteworthy, the album opener 'Fabulous' particularly so, or indeed the new track 'Disco Lover Suicide', for they were. I think, however, that the final straw for the luminaries behind the founding of Rook Lane Chapel came with the sudden revelation. They had been changing the playlist throughout and she had to tell her band-mates, there and then, that the penultimate track of the main set would be a cover and here they are playing it:

Jimi Hendrix' 'Voodoo Child'.

Live Music 2012 - A Weekend in Frome (Part 2)

This may seem illogical to you but not to me. I decided to divide the six acts that I saw over Friday and Saturday evenings into two groups of three. For a reason I have decided to do this - the result is that, having counted Acoustic+ backwards in order of appearance, it was time to do the remaining three in running order. That the first was on a different stage fully 24 hours before the others is merely a spatial and temporal quirk of fate.

I shall start with the first artist to appear at Acoustic+ on Friday evening. I have always felt for anyone who opens a show and I'm sure that it can never be more nerve-racking than when performing solo.  This may have been the Cheese and Grain but rather larger stages beckon (sooner rather than later)...

Molly Ross solo and performing her self-written songs.
  

I started with that for a very good reason. TV talent shows do turn up talented artists and the key to lasting success is quite possibly not winning. Think about it. 

Sam Kelly didn't win 'Britain's Got Talent 2012' but in the process he earned himself a solid support base and, judging from his performance with a band at Rook Lane Chapel yesterday evening, it is very well deserved. The combination of traditional, covers and self-penned songs was very well judged and, best of all, they looked like they were really enjoying themselves.

  

And it was quite handy for my meagre photography too.

The next photo is from towards the end of yesterday evening's performance. 

Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman - a duo recently short-listed for BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards 2013 but certainly no newcomers to the performance scene - a 'cello, three fiddles, a flute, two guitars and a keyboard liberally plastered in kids' stickers, with Patsy Reid joining them on fiddle and 'cello...  and have them play in a Grade 1 listed building that is currently also home to the 155th Royal Photographic Society Exhibition of Prints.

That pretty much sums up Frome.

Arts venues.

Frome is, for a town of approximately 25,500 inhabitants, blessed with a remarkable selection of arts venues, both for static displays and performance arts.  In the latter category the Cheese and Grain, capacity 800 and hopefully soon to be augmented in both capacity and facilities, is the most versatile if not particularly architecturally distinguished. It is a 19th century produce-market hall that has been adapted many times since. Frome also has two theatres, The Memorial Theatre completed in 1924 in memory of those killed in the Great War and the more recent Merlin Theatre, which seats about 250 and is part of the Frome College campus. All three are used for all kinds of performance arts and other live shows.
Then there are many historic pubs, some of which regularly feature live music: amongst those most active are The Griffin and The Olive Tree (link currently broken, phone 01373 467140) and also many other venues that are used from time to time, most notably for the annual Frome Festival - taking place this year from 8 - 17 July.
One however, that survives at all more by luck than judgement, is the most architecturally significant and spectacular by a long mile.  Built when Frome was a town very wealthy indeed, based on the wool trade, it spent 251 years in continuous use as a non-conformist place of worship before it was declared redundant and then spent the next quarter of a century falling into decay. It was eventually compulsorily purchased by the local authority and restored.
It now houses, appropriately enough, an architects' practise in the ante-rooms while the main section is used as a space for static and performance arts both traditional and modern by the trust Rook Lane Arts.

As well as being an early example of such a building on a grand scale the bountiful finance saw to it that it did not have the minimalist functionality of many and that its patrons succumbed to more than a flourish of the baroque. Nobody - whose mission was truly to live the life of an ascetic - would ever have sanctioned windows like those!
When it was built John Wesley certainly wasn't preaching simplicity and sobriety to the masses in open-air sermons across Britain, such as became his trademark, not least because he was then only a toddler (b. June 28, 1703)!
   
I'm not the religious kind in any traditional sense but wish to thank those that were for the venue.