Music Weblog

Folk gigs are funny things. If it is traditional folk music then it tends to be an older crowd who discovered folk in the sixties & attend Cropredy. More mainstream folk music attracts a younger audience with a smattering of the old folkies who have stayed up to date.

Cara Dillon is more traditional than modern but with her good looks and more recent albums demonstrating her singer-songwriter skills rather than a reliance on reworking traditional songs a reasonable proportion of the audience is young. Although there is a lack of smart phones, which is unusual at gigs now.

The cabaret table arrangement of Blackheath Halls was quite odd, frankly bails of hay would be better suited than the bizarre Las Vegas in a school hall affair. However, folk music being traditionally a music of the people (no pun intended on either parts of that statement) it was pleasing to see Cara and her band had the same seats as the rest of us to sit on, although they did not have candles on red beize covered table. Frankly, the hall had the feel of an inter-village bridge tournament rather than a music venue. The fact that it was the hottest night of the year so far and there was no air conditioning helped to make it quite sticky and uncomfortable with a hint of the party after the village fête about the evening.

Of course having blathered on about her being a singer-songwriter she then proceeded to open with some traditional Irish folk songs! Performers hey, who can trust then. Third song in was a killer track from her eponymous debut album, “Black is the Colour”, which almost stopped time as the audience was caught up in the circling rhythms of the piano whilst her etherial voice filled the space with crystaline emotion.

The sound was not quite balanced properley at the start with the acoustic guitars drowning out her beautifully pure voice but it did improve thereafter, which particularly important for a voice like Dillons. A duet with John Smith was particularly good, although he was clearly influenced by the recently deceased John Martyn, their voices blended together like a good Irish whiskey that is a favourite of mine..

Her Northern Irish accent was not evident when she sang but came through sparkling with wit in her between song chats, which veered from how most of the folk songs were about badly behaved men to who was going to win Britain’s got Talent, the final of which was on at the same time as the gig. It was quite obvious where the talent was on Blackheath though.

Ultimately the test of a good gig is whether it transported the audience out of that time and place and into the world created by the melody and the lyrics. In that Cara Dillon and her band succeeded magnificently as the red beize tables and conference seats melted into the heat of a May night whilst the music took us to the Hill of Thieves in County Derry.