Bellow World
The signs are here tonight in this rather charming old venue in King’s Cross as the crowds, who have indeed been queueing round the block while panic reigns supreme inside, pile in. This is not your run-of-the-mill folk audience. Why, there’s young people and everything and they’re whooping. Summat’s up here alright.
They were originally tagged as the John Spiers & Jon Boden big band, a conception cemented by the fact that their repertoire was based almost entirely on tried and trusted Spiers/ Boden duo material, adapted and upgraded for a new big band life. The E.P.Onymous material is essentially a radically refuelled showcase of material that had stood Spiers & Boden so well on their two duo albums, but had sufficient whoosh factor to not only capture the imaginations of their existing fan base, but unexpectedly grabbed the ears of a brand new audience too.
Tonight’s Scala gala is partly designed as a showcase, a tentative toe in the waters of a world beyond the folk scene, and it’s not just the venue, the atmosphere is different to most folk gigs. Perhaps prompted by some non-specialist press coverage, the young audience approaches it like a rock gig and, squeezebox on fire, John Spiers is quick to respond in kind, playing with driving intensity. The joyous atmosphere is truly startling, driving Boden to almost cartoonesque levels of vocal extravagance and the rest of the band relax into the mood of maverick mayhem. Bellowhead are visual, infectious, funny and, while it’s not uppermost in the grand scheme of things tonight, bloody good musically on almost every level. You begin to imagine that the elusive, much-sought holy grail of an English folk act that has the technique and vision to inject something genuinely new into the mix, but also has credibility yet the accessibility to break through to a wider audience, is close at hand. They are good, very good, but the best thing about them is that they’ve barely scratched the surface and who knows what they’ll come up with as they stride further away from the ‘Spiers & Boden big band’ concept.