Live: Wolf People, Sebright Arms, London
- Written by Robert Freeman
Depending on the genre of music, the percentage of the audience that has attended a cider festival increases. Your standard pop concert for example, is fairly low. Beth Orton’s doing a tour? It’s perhaps a bit higher. Wolf People? It’s 100%. One hundred percent. One assumes psych-halflings, Wolf People spent their teenage years in their rooms listening to Zeppelin and Captain Beefheart, before emerging blinking into the sunlight three years ago and producing 2010’s most barn-storming album of prog. Steeple, Tidings and now new album, Fain all tap into a psych/folk musical tradition normally reserved for men of a more advanced age*, and their ninety minute set at the Sebright Arms contains all the prog greats of days gone by - dueling banjos, finger-tapping, a man with a band t-shirt, some stomp-pedal (though a lamentable absence of prog-flute – alas, there is rarely space for a prog-flautist on tour).
Despite multiple references to ‘fair maidens’ (babes) ‘squires’ (blokes) and ‘drunken pastors’ (lads) however, Wolf People deftly tow the Stonehenge line, and stay quite the right side of rock parody. All power chords and folk guitar-play, there is more than one side to Wolf People, who enjoy their riff-swapping guitar-strutting as much as their delicate Pentangle/Jethro Tull noodling. In between long, meandering folk narratives Jack Sharp and Joe Hollick begin soloing discordantly, only the drums linking two sides of the stage, but gradually the two guitars synch up and segue into one another from a delicate dueling banjo into a doubled-up riff.
Far from self-indulgent, the guitar work acts as a link between time signatures, between the two different sides of the band. Sharp’s vocals manage to be gentle but swaggering at the same time, and from the blues stomp of ‘One By One At Dorney Reach’ to the Kafkan strangeness of ‘Castle Keep’, to the witchfinder-general harmony of ‘Painted Cross’ the combination of the band’s two sides, at times both delicate and aggressive, makes one feel that the fact that the form is far from new, does not prevent it from being forward-looking. Wolf People - you can learn all there is to know about their ways in a month; yet after a hundred years they can still surprise you.
* Come on - they are mostly men. And they’ve all got beards. And yeast infections.