Support came from Gren Bartley, a Leicester-based singer-songwriter who has clearly imbibed deep from the flagon of Nick Drake. Intelligent and carefully-strung lyrics warmed the crowd up nicely (oh, and "he's hot" - Mrs BRoutes). Much of Gren's banter concerned his pie-eyed adoration for the main act, whom he had apparently petitioned to support on their tour. Great things were expected...
If your assumptions about The Old Dance School have been formed from their second and most recent record, Forecast, you'll know they're seriously inventive, clever crafters of tunes which manage to sound both as old as England and as 21st Century as dubstep. But on record, they can sound a little polite, restrained, cold even. What you wouldn't have expected is just how blisteringly big and exciting their live sound is (and respect must be given to the soundman - they've got a recorder in there, courtesy of the spectacular Laura Carter). The evening kicked off with the opening track from Forecast, The Enilli Light, which (it turns out) is introduced by a minute or so of ethereal note-less trumpeting being looped back into the band by Aaron Diaz. Live looping and traditional folk turn out to be happy bedfellows.
Duelling fiddles from the string section, Helen Lancaster and Samantha Norman, and Robin Beatty's guitar and occasional vocals provided the most obvious focal points, but it was the woodwind and horn (Carter and Diaz) and Tom Chapman's cajon which created the magic. Without them, the band would merely be an accomplished live act, playing pleasant folk music. Add that trio into the mix, and The Old Dance School prove to have a complete and exciting live sound which already justifies a larger stage than the Folk House can offer. Chapman's cajon-playing is both expansive and tense, tightly-wired and jazzily open-ended. The trumpet and recorder played from opposite ends of the stage, themselves duelling to couterpoint the strings and, with the slapping double bass of Adam Jarvis, confidently pulled the tunes away from the brink of fiddle-de-dee towards a more difficult, more ska / jazz-influenced sound. What makes the band so strong live is that combination of closely-controlled traditional folk melody and the ever-present threat that they will break out into something more free-form, more improvised, less directed, at any moment.
The band is made up of former students at the Birmingham Conservatoire ("the boys studied jazz, the girls classical", they say, with an eyebrow raised) who got together in 2006 to put together some doubtlessly off-course folk music. Their youth belies their confidence and cohesiveness - and their way with an audience. Seemingly improvised moment of the night: Chapman complaining to the crowd that the set-list he had been handed was printed on the back of one of Lancaster's teaching aide memoires, suggesting that the band was supposed to be playing the Best of Modern Hollywood, rather than something they'd rehearsed for; Carter popped in the opening bars of the Titanic theme tune... Always good to see a band mucking about on stage.
There are, of course, rough edges. Beatty's pipes can be a bit reedy (though that, of course, is something he shares with Jon Boden), and their cover of Sydney Carter's John Ball aside, the songs were hardly show-stoppers. When they came, they didn't make enough use of Laura Carter's voice - albeit how one is supposed to sing and play recorder is perhaps a puzzle yet to be solved. The jigs had a tendency to meld into one, a difficulty which doesn't affect the set-listing their albums. The highlight of Forecast, Spaghetti Panic (another cover), was simply too short. On record, the track stands out because the slow build-up to cacophony in the middle section takes about two minutes to reach a climax.
But these are cavills. The band is already booked into the summer festival circuit. They have a live sound which is made for big (and unseated) crowds. Their Bristol gig was exciting, bursting with musicianship, filled with joy and hinting at even better things to come.
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