“Where’s your Christmas Market gone?”
In that joke about the lack of stalls in the square outside, Kate Rusby unwittingly explained why Maximum Volume Music hasn’t seen her in ages. You see, Dear Reader, your humble scribe hates Christmas, so the idea of a festive show makes all kinds of skin crawl.
This, though, was different. This was Rusby’s other songs. The “singy songy” ones. A show to celebrate life rather than Yule-tide, and if “Springshine” sounds like the sort of thing that might have been dreamed up to make everything feel a little warmer, then that’s exactly what happened at Birmingham Town Hall.
“Walk The Road” was first, and straight away there it was: that voice. Beautiful, warm, effortless, and absolutely without artifice. Rusby is one of those performers who makes hard things sound easy, which is probably the point. “Only Desire What You Have”, an old French ballad, was happy and content in the way folk music can be when it stops trying to impress you.
That positive nature ran through “Today Again”, too, but the synth from Duncan Lyall took the chorus somewhere else entirely, lifting it out of the earth and into the rafters. “Let Your Light Shine”, from last year’s album, was written for her teenage daughters, and there was something lovely in the way Rusby framed it. She is 52 now, she said, and there is something nice about not having that pressure anymore. No posing, no chasing, no nonsense. Just songs, stories and the sense of someone utterly at home.
“The Mermaid” had been requested by fans online and saw guitarist Sam Kelly cast, in his own words, as the “Lidl own-brand Dan Tyminski” who performed on the album. That self-deprecation was typical of the evening. So was Rusby’s line that the folk police insist you depress 68% of your audience. Yet “William And Davy”, a golden oldie with her husband Damien O’Kane shining, was anything but miserable. “Three Little Birds” had brought sunshine into her life during lockdown, she said, and here it did much the same. “Ghost”, another request, came with the revelation that she has one in her house, because of course she does.
After the break, “Hunter Moon” opened the second half, vast in scope despite Rusby’s kettle-related issues, which somehow made the whole thing even more charming. “Farmer’s Toast”, an old English folk song and a favourite of her parents, brought with it the important news that she doesn’t like llamas. You don’t get that at most gigs. “The Mocking Bird”, about someone you trusted for years not selling the truth, should perhaps have cut harder, but Rusby simply doesn’t sound harsh. There is too much humanity in her voice for that.
Then came “Manic Monday”, a favourite of hers growing up, remade in her own image rather than treated as some clever novelty. “Who Will Sing Me Lullabies?”, written about the tragic loss of a friend, was beautiful in the way that only songs about real grief can be. It didn’t need to push. It just had to exist.
The “manly boys tunes” gave O’Kane, Kelly and Lyall space to prove what incredible musicians they are, before “The Fairest Of All Yarrow”, a favourite of theirs, survived even a coughing fit and found room for a snippet of Yazz’s “The Only Way Is Up”. The Kinks’ “Village Green Preservation Society”, made famous all over again by “Jam & Jerusalem”, was played entirely in Rusby’s style, which is to say it sounded as if it had always belonged there.
For the encore, “Underneath The Stars” brought back the sky watcher in her, and it enveloped the room like hot chocolate under the blanket.
But it was the chorus of that Kinks number that swirled around afterwards: “Preserving the old ways from being abused / Protecting the new ways for me and for you / What more can we do?”
And really, isn’t that what this wonderfully uplifting show celebrated?
In a world full of posers, Kate Rusby looked like she’d rather have been nowhere else tonight. No grandstanding. No fakery. No need. Just old songs, new songs, daft stories, brilliant players and a voice that can still make the world feel better than it is.
“Springshine” is quite something.
