Josienne Clarke is a singer-songwriter obsessed with gloom and Sandy Denny. And now that she and guitarist Ben Walker have won best duo in this year’s folk awards, there’s no stopping her. “I can be as miserable as I like,” she announced. “Feel free to leave, but don’t tell me to cheer up. This is five-star misery.” The combination of bleak songs and humorous introductions is nothing new in the folk scene, where so many traditional ballads deal with parting and death, but Clarke specialises in mixing the old with new songs of loss, regret and passing time.
She is also very funny and an impressive, versatile singer. She may not have the emotional range of Sandy Denny, the finest-ever female British folk and folk-rock singer, but the opening Reynardine and Like An Old Fashioned Waltz, along with a later Fotheringay, did her heroine justice. Clarke was helped by the thoughtful acoustic guitar work of Ben Walker, who also provided the arrangements for the backing trio of viola, cello and double bass. The result was an exercise in elegant and melancholy folk chamber music.
St Pancras church looked like a cosy sitting room, with chairs and table lamps in front of the altar, and the two 45-minute sets were intimate and unexpectedly varied. Traditional sad songs such as Green Grow the Laurels were matched against Clarke’s bitter song of jealousy Anyone But Me, or her study of faded grandeur The Tangled Tree, from last year’s Nothing Can Bring Back the Hour. She also included Gillian Welch’s suitably bleak Dark Turn of Mind, and saved the greatest surprises for the finale, where the ensemble switched from a stately treatment of Elgar’s As Torrents in Summer to Jackson C Frank’s Milk and Honey, and finally Nina Simone’s poignant, pained and bluesy For All We Know. Miserable but magnificent.
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Worthing Pier, Worthing, Sussex, 27 October. Box office: 01903 206 206. Then touring until 19 December.
