Review: Kate Rusby at the Royal Hall, Harrogate

Friday, December 10, 2010



Surrounded by Christmas trees, fairy lights and a gaggle of cheery musicians, the “Barnsley Nightingale” brought an early festive treat to Harrogate.

“It’s very good to be in Yorkshire,” announces Penistone-born Kate Rusby as she strolls on stage at the Royal Hall, dressed all in black, save for a white necklace and bangle.

The county’s the only place on earth you can get a good cup of tea, she says.

For the next two hours she dazzles a three quarters-full hall with a catalogue of carols and a smattering of songs from her new album, Make the Light.

And while her vocals are plaintive and pure, her personality is playful - and as big as the Royal Hall.

She regales the audience with stories about her daughter and her dog, recalls some peculiar complaints about her performances - “Someone was very offended that I was singing songs about Jesus,” she recalls, while a BBC viewer balked at the sight of her knees - and accuses her multi-instrumentalist husband of being a cross-dresser.

Many of her festive tunes are drawn from the tradition of pub sing-alongs in South Yorkshire and Derbyshire pubs. While some were “thrown out by the Victorians for being too raucous”, there’s room for more reflective fare delivered in Rusby’s inimitable fashion: eyes closed, head cocked to one side, hands clutching the mic stand, her voice as crisp and clear as fresh snow.

The highlights include Here We Come A-Wassailing - even more joyous and knockabout than on the 2008 Christmas record from which eight of the songs are taken - The Holly and the Ivy, slowed down in a manner that makes it sound utterly new, and The Mocking Bird, a glorious cut from Make the Light that’s at once powerful and delicate, the soaring vocal sparsely backed by guitar and bass.

Even the decision to let husband and collaborator Damien O’Kane play the title track from his debut album Summer Hill pays off. Such concessions to a headliner’s partner are usually unwelcome, but O’Kane, from Coleraine, Northern Ireland, has a fascinating voice and Rusby’s harmonising on this lovely song is first-rate.

She rips through Sweet Bells - “an absolute favourite” - and offers a transcendent take on the elliptical Poor Old Horse, before closing with O Little Town of Bethlehem, an effective bit of staging placing the focus on the brass band.

Rusby’s announcement that it would be the last song had drawn groans from the audience. “Well, if you clap loudly, I’ll come back on,” she had added with a wicked grin.

And so she does, quipping: “It just so happens that we do know two more. That’s lucky.”

If Hark, Hark, What News is pleasant if unremarkable, Rusby pulls out all the stops with The Wren, the juxtaposition between her appealing, cheery banter and heart-stopping, often heartbreaking, singing never more pronounced.

Summarising the song’s roots in children’s Christmas tradition - “Look, we’ve got a bird in a box - some treats and money, please” - she recalls her own confusion at the lyrics, “We have cannon and ball to conquer them all”, which as a young girl she took to refer to the ‘80s comedians, then promptly launches into a spellbinding vocal that sends a shiver down the spine.

My dad, who was up in the dress circle, said it brought back memories of seeing Sandy Denny in her prime, which is as high praise as I can think of.

“I love Christmas,” Rusby had told us. Her Harrogate gig was a captivating evening that for a few hundred of us heralded the real start of the festive season.
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This article was written by Rick Burin and appeared on Page 27 of the Harrogate Advertiser, December 24, 2010.

Theatre review: Alan Bennett at the Royal Hall, Harrogate

Sunday, July 25, 2010



There's something entirely winning about Alan Bennett’s familiar, unassuming persona.

He might be among the most talented, versatile and influential writers of his generation. He might be one of the top draws at this year’s Harrogate International Festival. And he might have just sold out the Royal Hall.

But, shuffling onto the stage in a tweed suit and green tie, he’s not giving his show the big sell.

“I’m going to read bits of plays and things from my career - such as it is,” he says.

And for the next hour-and-a-quarter, seated meekly in a black leather armchair, he does just that, providing a whirlwind tour of a singular back catalogue that encompasses novels, theatre, TV and films - all stamped with that trademark blend of pathos and wry humour.

The resulting show is breathlessly funny, but also remarkably candid, down-to-earth and even outspoken, incorporating a heartfelt defence of “two institutions we are going to have to fight for”: the NHS and the BBC.

After a few teething problems with the microphone (“You’ll have to talk among yourselves,” he says), Bennett starts with a gem from 1968’s Forty Years On, an uproarious account of T.E. Lawrence’s life supposedly written by a fradulent confidant.

A man called Graham

Next up is an excerpt from Getting On, with its genuine - if knowing - tribute to the welfare state. It segues seamlessly into a new piece, written in his dressing room before coming on, that earnestly and passionately pleads for the audience to safeguard its institutions.

He speaks of the state as “nurturer” and “saviour”, saying: “For my generation, brought up in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the state educated us, so that everything I have I owe to the state.”

Habeas Corpus merits a brief diversion, before we’re treated to the evening’s highlight, an extended reading from A Chip in the Sugar, the memorable Talking Heads episode narrated by Bennett’s Graham, a damaged soul whose relationship with his mother is shattered by a figure from her past.

“If there’s one thing mother and I agree on, it’s that red is a common colour, and the whole place is done up in red,” he says, as the audience considers the impossibly ornate interior of the Royal Hall - much of it in red - and bursts out laughing.

After selections from Telling Tales and his 2004 play The History Boys, there’s a 15-minute Q&A, taking in technology (“I don’t see how you can take a screen to bed with you”), the Queen (“She’s magnetic”) and regional accents (“The accent that’s still slightly a joke is Wolverhampton, the others all get by”).

Bennett reveals that he wouldn’t have attended university were today’s funding system in place and recalls his father’s pride as he watched other members of the audience laughing at Habeas Corpus, though he says the reaction to his later work would have been mixed - “He didn’t like anything he called ‘cheeky’.”

He closes with a reading from Untold Stories about his battle with colon cancer in the late ‘90s that’s rich in melancholic humour.

'Greatest hits'

It ends a wonderful night’s entertainment: a ‘greatest hits’ package mixing the familiar and the new; both painfully frank and painfully funny.

Bennett’s peerless ear for dialogue and his gift for articulating his audience’s feelings are perhaps summed up by a passage he reads from The History Boys.

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you,” he says.

“And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead.

“And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."

With a set that comprised the first half of the evening, pianist Alessandro Taverna gave an ecstatically-received performance.

Apparently having just as good a time as the audience, he played selections from Beethoven, Rachmaninov and Moszkowski, with highlights including a delicate take on Chopin’s Nocturne in B major, Op. 62 and an exuberant “Carmen Fantasy” by Busoni.

He concluded with several uptempo pieces by Viennese pianist Friedrich Gulda, which brought down the house.
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This article was written by Rick Burin and appeared on Page 33 of the Harrogate Advertiser, July 30, 2010.