Review: Nick Hart & Tom Moore, The Folk House – ‘They tell stories that need to be kept alive’

Where better to launch the best English Folk album of the year than Bristol’s Folk House? A room that evokes a wood panelled, velvet draped sanctum.

Festooned with lights and full of friends. Somehow it captured, perfectly, the spirit and atmosphere of The Colour of Amber, the wonderful new album by Nick Hart and Tom Moore.

It is generally agreed that Hart is the best interpreter of an English Folk song of his generation. Those that know put him in the same bracket as his hero, Martin Carthy.

Tom Moore is an extraordinary viola player and runs the brilliant Slow Worm Records. They’ve been making music together for years and The Colour of Amber is an album of staggering vibrancy.

Hart and Moore are the most convivial of hosts for this launch party. They are clearly great friends, knowing enough of one another to gently tease and allow us, safely, into their world.

There is talk of heartburn, wild boar sausage rolls, far-right viols and socialist violas, at one point Hart says, with a grin and a wicked twinkle “I’ve got nothing to say to you people”. He does though, he very clearly does.

Hart, you see, is a natural storyteller.  On Raggle Taggle Gypsies, he is full of empathy and understanding, strength and resilience. A song, so well known, so often heard takes on a warmth and tenderness in Hart’s hands.

His is a voice of reassurance coupled with the blurry, fuzzy tones of a memory, gently slipping from view. It is the first of several songs this evening taken from the Traveller community and Hart makes it abundantly clear of his love of the Roma traditions and those that surround them.

In a world where prejudice is, sadly, too easy, Hart and Moore remind us of the humanity of all people.

Both The Colour of Amber and Riding Down to Portsmouth come from the repertoire of the great Gypsy singer Mary Anne Haynes. Reportedly born in a wagon parked behind a pub she, quite obviously, is a huge inspiration to the pair.

The Colour of Amber, itself, is as gorgeously English, as hazily pastoral as a late August Bramley apple. Hart’s voice fits perfectly to Moore’s fluid, lyrical viola; it is interesting that he so often takes on a feminine role in his songs. He becomes “every person”, “every voice”, “every memory”.

Even on a song as nasty as Babylon – an outlaw kills two women, tries to kill a third but finds out that they are his sisters- Hart finds a deflated, heartbroken realisation. You almost feel sorry for the wretch in the song. Almost.

Interestingly the tune was one collected from the ex-headmistress of Redland High School for Girls and this knowledge, somehow, undercuts the unpleasantness.

Where Hart’s voice exudes a late-summer warmth it is Moore’s viola playing that brings out the golden hues in the Amber.

On Ladies Pleasure he handles complex time signatures with ease, keeping a glorious dancefloor friendly pace, twinning beautifully with Hart’s viol de gamba.

The Valiant is a jig by Simon Ritchie and is another that simply radiates warmth; it is the warmth of a fireside, the warmth of a sleeping dog. Moore gently stoking fires around which we can all gather.

On Flowers of Edinburgh his viola dips and spins, elegantly, gracefully turning around the dancefloor.

Hart and Moore tell stories of robbers and outlaws, sailors and fighters, of victims and villains, of the ordinary and the extraordinary.

They tell stories that need to be kept alive and, this evening, these stories were whistled down Park Street, hummed as we went into the dark. Each of us surrounded by an amber coloured glow.

Main photo: Gavin McNamara

Read next:

• Review: CMAT, SWX – ‘A renaissance cowgirl dream’
• Review: BC Camplight, SWX – ‘His songs take on a completely new lease of life’
• Review: Ward Knutur Townes, Downend Folk & Roots – ‘Folk in its widest sense’

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