Review: Levert, The New Room – ‘Spontaneous, unplanned magic’

Sometimes magical things happen by accident, completely spontaneously, with no planning.

A few moments into folk three-piece, Leveret, second set at The New Room, the lights fizzed, popped and went out.

All that was left in The Wesleyan Chapel were a handful of candles, a breathless hush and three of the most remarkable, acoustic musicians.

Without blinking, Leveret played Filberts, from their wonderful new album Forms, and magic was made. Sam Sweeney’s violin delicately bobbing and weaving through the central tune.

This air of spontaneity is something that you get used to when watching Andy Cutting on melodeon and accordion, Rob Harbron on concertina and Sweeney on violin.

While they may be best known for playing with other bands (Bellowhead, The Full English, Blowzabella amongst many, many others), they have been together, as Leveret, for 10 years now.

That’s ten years of making the most beautiful, most delicate acoustic folk music. 10 years of an almost telepathic understanding.

At one stage Sweeney tries to explain their process. They don’t really rehearse, don’t really have specific arrangements for the tunes that they play, don’t really know who’s going to play what, when. Knowing this makes the music that Leveret plays even more extraordinary.

They start with The Chirping of the Lark, it’s so hushed that you can almost hear the candles flickering, a perfectly fitting hymn-like glow cast into every corner.

Cutting and Sweeney playfully twining around one another as Harbron gently, sedately gives them a solid ground on which to move.

Occasionally one of the instruments breaks free and floats to the surface, the violin arcing from the tune, breaking the surface. All three instrumentalists remain seated throughout the whole performance but their feet never stop tapping.

Across the decade that Leveret have been together, one of the things that they have always been wonderful at is interpreting a story.

Elegy for Jacques/Jacques Covemaeker is inspired by the last victim of World War 2, a farmer blown up whilst ploughing his field in the 1980s. It starts as a plaintive tune, the melancholy picked over in the most sensitive of ways. It’s only when all three work together that the sadness is replaced by something else.

By the end of these two tunes, we are shown a call to the embrace of home, but it’s the warmest, deepest, most comforting embrace. An embrace that you could sleep in.

Much of this set has a quiet restraint. The music is contemplative and thoughtful. It’s the very antithesis to everything that’s going on outside of this Chapel right now.

In the world of Leveret, everything is OK, there’s no cruelty, no anger, just beauty. Robbers Road is almost the most beautiful of all; a filmic, slow-motion gallop across lush, green fields. It is dance-y in a beautifully old-fashioned way and, as with many of their original tunes, written by Rob Harbron.

Harbron is unassuming on stage. He doesn’t have the wide-eyed-kid-in-a-sweet-shop energy of Sweeney nor the mischievous twinkle of Cutting.

Instead, he takes on the business of grounding these gorgeous tunes, stopping them floating away. Without him you feel that Leveret might simply disappear.

On Woodstock Bower/Alvin’s/Scarlet and Green/Nelson’s Maggot he is the one that allows these four tunes to make sense, to flow seamlessly together. He’s also the one that allows the other two to have enormous fun while adding gloriously sweet little concertina moments.

At eleven minutes this set is the longest tune that they play but it’s so lovely that you never want it to stop.

So many tunes this evening are hypnotic and mesmeric, they are old-fashioned folk-dance pieces played wholly acoustically and perfectly suited to a Chapel that opened in the 1700s.

It is, however, a tune from earlier than that that lights up the evening. Mr Lane’s Minuet is taken from John Playford’s 1651 book The Dancing Master. How can a tune that’s almost 400 years old be this lovely, this fresh, this joyful?

It’s hard not to picture the ghosts of this place exchanging coy smiles as they twirl around lost, as we are, in the most beautiful music.

This is what happens when brilliant musicians understand each other instinctively. Spontaneous, unplanned magic that lights up the world.

Main photo: Gavin McNamara

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