shewhomust | Coming out in the wash

The Launderette Sessions is a four-day music festival curated by the Old Cinema Launderette (yes, a real former cinema; also a functioning launderette; also a genuine music venue), which enabled us to go to two excellent gigs on two successive evenings. How often does that happen?

It was a dark and stormy night, in the aftermath of storm Ali, and we drove up to the Launderette, splashed inside and found Nancy Kerr sitting at the coffee table just inside the door with a large glass of merlot, and James Fagan perched on a chair behind her: that's the sort of venue it is. Slightly strange, to be inside a warm and well-lit space, full of brilliant music, but with a constant backdrop of cars driving past in the rainy darkness outside the plate glass windows; but then, no stranger a backdrop than the row of tumble dryers...

The support act were Hareshaw Linn (it's the name of a waterfall, which makes finding them on the internet a bit of a challenge), three young women who I'm sure I have seen at Folk Degree student shows. Discussing them the following evening with a couple who had recognised us from the gig, the woman said how glad she was to have seen them, because it gave her a baseline from which to appreciate what Nancy Kerr was doing - that sounds very harsh, and it was neither intended nor taken that way, but it chimed with my impression, that they want to be Nancy Kerr when they grow up: set aside her extraordinary songwriting (although at least one of Hareshaw Linn does write her own songs), and the big difference is not their mix of vocals musicianship, traditional and contemporary material, but their lack of assurance with the audience, the sense that they are somehow not filling the space. They were fine, and I'd like to hear them again in a couple of years. My one real complaint is (and this may be part of that failure to engage with the audience) that they don't adequately credit their material. Their first song, about a miners' dispute in the 1960s over a pound a week rise, left me completely mystified (aha! it's by Ed Pickford); and if you are going to sing Fareweel, Regality, I'd rather be told that Terry Conway wrote it than which of you brought it into the band's repertoire.

In this, as in so much else, Nancy Kerr demonstrated how to do it right: her version of Barbara Allen, for example, was traced back through early memories of her mother's singing to a recording by Queen Caroline Hughes - and I could write an entire post about that one song, about what Nancy told us about teaching it to folk degree students (one of whom responded with an adaptation called 'The Stalker') and how far that derives from that particular version... The song which was still going through my head two nights later was The Seeds of Love, which is odd, because it has never been a particular favourite of mine. A fine version of Broadside from the Elizabethan Session, accompanied only by percussion, revealed it as a classic (feminist) sea shanty. A new song, Mr Weather, written "so my friends would have a song to sing under a tree", took as its starting point her children's affection for a particular coppery barked flowering cherry, which ought to be too sweet for my taste, but wasn't. Finally, since there was a piano available (every launderette should have one), James Fagan joined her for an encore of Shetland fiddle tunes.

And the following night, Martin Simpson was at the Gala theatre. But right now it's bed-time.