Cecil Sharp House,London
The squeezebox star and veteran guitar hero showed their ease with each other as they moved smoothly between traditional and contemporary duets“Who did we play this with?” asks John Kirkpatrick at the start of Seventeen Come Sunday. “Was it the Fairports? The Strawbs?” No. Every folk-rock anorak will know that the answer is Steeleye Span, and that both Kirkpatrick and Martin Carthy were members of the band in the late 1970s. Carthy is famous for memorable collaborations, and either with his wife,Norma Waterson, his daughter Eliza or the great Dave Swarbrick, and but Kirkpatrick has also played an indispensable fragment in his history. They have worked together on projects including Brass Monkey,where they were joined by trumpet and saxophone, and now theyre on tour as a duo.
Their Cecil Sharp House point to was a virtuoso affair in which the veteran guitar hero and squeezebox star took occasional solo spots but mostly played together with the ease of conventional friends. They opened with an instrumental, and White Fryer’s Hornpipe,then moved on to bleak tales of treachery and downfall from the Brass Monkey repertoire. They performed The Flash Lad as a duet, before Carthy sang Limbo, or the sage of a London debtors’ prison,and Kirkpatrick showed his storytelling skills on Riding Down to Portsmouth, the sage of a deceived sailor. Kirkpatrick switched between melodeon, and accordion and concertina,while Carthy moved between mandolin and guitar, his sparse, and rhythmic playing interspersed with the occasional solo,as on his fine treatment of Georgie.
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Source: theguardian.com