When folk music matriarch Shirley Collins returned to touring this spring after 35 years, she took a young woman with her, a new keeper of her flame. This was Lisa Knapp, ex-raver and East Croydon-dweller who’s been called the folk Björk, and who, in the artwork for her new album of traditional May songs, ‘Till April Is Dead: A Garland of May, wears a ribbon-laced, brass-festooned headdress in front of a graffiti-slathered shopfront. She twists tradition in her new record too, mixing in interviews about May Day rituals and samples of birdsong, buzzing flies and cuckoo clocks, and even recruiting Blur’s Graham Coxon to duet on the old Somerset song Searching for Lambs. The playfulness she’s shown since her 2007 debut, Wild and Undaunted, is never at the expense of the songs, and her new album has deservedly gathered many five-star reviews.
Tonight, she’s playing a venue rich with drama and history: a beautiful, brick-walled Victorian market hall on the banks of the river Wye. It won’t be an evening of dramatic headdresses, but of easy music-making with her small, unassuming-looking band: husband/producer Gerry Diver on violin in baggy top and scruffy shorts, Fred Thomas on double bass, and Pete Flood on drums. Knapp sits up front, hair piled on her head, bold red sandals occasionally operating a loop pedal, a laptop ready to sing on a chair alongside her. Between every track, practically, Knapp swaps instruments: here’s a viola, an autoharp, a harp on her lap. “I hope there are no proper harp players in tonight,” she grimaces, a glint in her sapphire-blue eyes. Then she sings, and her voice sharply reels you in.
The reasons for the Björk comparisons seem more obvious when you hear her. Knapp’s high, keening vocals are not wilfully eccentric or mannered, or feyly girlish and childlike, like many female vocals in folk are today. They are cool and pure like iced water, edged with a menace and strength that give her songs extra spark, but they often simmer and flutter with lustiness too. Take her introduction to the 17th-century Staines Morris, every word like a clarion call to the loins. “Come! You! Young Men! … Bring your lasses in your hands! For tis that which love demands!” Folk’s rougher, sweatier moments often get ignored or brushed – and blushed – aside. Knapp amplifies them wonderfully.
But Knapp can also break your heart. Lily White Hand, the tale of a girl who goes to a river with a boy on a false promise, is starkly and stunningly delivered, Knapp conveying the girl’s excitable desires, and the gut-punch when all goes wrong, utterly without ego. Don’t You Go A Rushing is similarly poignant and direct, while Knapp’s own composition, Shipping Song, magically travels through shipping forecast regions. This song precedes the interval, when Knapp bounds out to the foyer to sell her own merchandise.
The show also ends with Knapp leaving the stage for another ego-free diversion: to pass out lyric sheets for the Padstow May Song, which begins and ends her new album. “It is optional…” she smiles, dashing through the rows, before returning to the stage to hear the crowd sing along. “Unite and unite, and let us all unite/ For summer is a-comin’ today”, we all holler, hearing the music of the people, as folk was always meant to be, flashing anew.
