Southern Tenant Folk Union get up close and musical

Liz Crosthwaite • Published 20 Jan 2012 09:30 0 Comments

Share this

click to enlarge
NO HI-NONNYS HERE: Southern Tenant Folk Union

Mumford And Sons, Laura Marling Noah And The Whale... nu-folk was the buzzword of last year. But there's a band who've been blending respect for bluegrass and Celtic folk traditions with modern twists since long before the hipsters started bandying about new genre names.

Southern Tenant Folk Union are that band. They take their name from the groundbreaking multi-racial union of sharecroppers and non-landowning tenant farmers founded in Arkansas in the 1930s, and they're coming to South Street Arts Centre on Saturday, January 28. The Guide caught up with frontman Pat McGarvey to find out about their fourth album Pencaitland, and to hear how getting close to your banmates can make for a much better gig…

"I just was driving around outside Edinburgh and saw the name Pencaitland on a sign - I didn't visit it actually until after we had done the album," Pat said, explaining how he came up with the album title. "I just liked it. The album before Pencaitland was sort of talking about what might happen in the future, if things went wrong in the world, and resouces ran low, and I just extrapolated it on this album.

"I wanted to write about what happens next, and one of the ideas that occurred to me was that if there was some kind of disruption in the world, what would happen if some free thinkers met up to form a new, different town and make things better this time? And in the song it does not work, and that's me saying maybe the problem is not the ideas, it's us as humans beings.

"So Pencaitland was the name of the fictional town.. it's got a nice cadence, those syllables - if that had not been working I would have chosen something better!"

The seven-piece, who hail from around the UK (Pat is Belfast-born) but are based in Edinburgh, and have come up with a novel way of coping with small stages at gigs: "Rather than us standing all separate on the stage like rockstars with our own amps and mics, we all stand around one microphone in a sort of horseshoe shape, really close, with our shoulders touching. And as someone's instrument needs to be heard more, they move closer to the mic and literally hold the instrument up to it, and the same happens with our vocals, so we are sort of mixing the sound ourselves on stage, and it's very visual for the audience as well."

Pat added that while they had been compared in reviews to big names on the nu-folk scene, Southern Tenant Folk Union are a different proposition: "There's no real comparison between us and Mumford And Sons or Laura Marling - those bands are on major labels with lots of money behind them," said Pat.

"But I think their popularity has opened people's ears to acoustic music, that it is just as expressive and creative, if not more, than electric music. The old formula of four white guys, guitars, drums, bass and vocals - it's been flogged to death. But for acoustic music, we can really blend the folk tradition and put our own take on it. We are doing the Scottish thing with our future tales - mining things from the past and things from the future, showing we're able to do more than a fiddly-diddly, hi-nonny-no version of folk."

Tickets to the gig cost £12 from www.readingarts.com or call 0118 960 60 60.

This article appeared in Royal Borough Observer 20 Jan 12

Return to the main index, get more from this section or browse our The Guide archives.

Follow @windsorobserver