Review: Sam Sweeney, The Wardrobe Theatre – ‘Charming, delightfully affable and ridiculously smiley’

Right at the start of this packed, intimate, wonderfully relaxed gig Sam Sweeney is lost in tuning one of his violins.

He’s talking about Morris tunes and, with a grin, he says “Did you know, Morris is cool now?”. The audience chuckle because they know. They know that Morris has never been cool but they know that right now is as close as it’s ever going to get.

Watching The Brits last week, you’d have seen Wet Leg (or “The Wet Legs” as Sweeney’s aunty calls them), a host of Morris dancers and some people dressed as huge folkloric animals. Sam Sweeney might be best known for being in Bellowhead but he was in the owl costume, capering about like a loon. You couldn’t miss him.

Similarly, it’s hard to take your eyes off of Sweeney tonight. He sits, centre stage, flanked by four fiddles and plays as though his very life depends upon it.

Did you ever have a teacher that you loved? One that brought the subject to life, got side-tracked, got too excited, told stories vaguely connected to what they were teaching, exuded passion, one that you just wanted to be in the same room as? Sweeney is that teacher. He’s charming, delightfully affable and ridiculously smiley. He loves what he does.

What he does, for this evening at least, is play solo fiddle tunes. The afore-mentioned Morris tunes, minuets, hornpipes and gorgeous Scottish dance tunes. Each and every one a little lesson in simplicity and loveliness.

With each Sweeney is entirely engulfed in his own private reverie, feet relentlessly tapping out rhythms and blessed with a look of beatification.

Orange in Bloom/The Upton on Severn Stick Dance are as English as can be, his violin is redolent of hedgerows and drowsy, bee-drenched sunshine. It fuzzes and buzzes over the tunes.

Similarly, The Cuckoo’s Nest/Old Tom of Oxford have a transcendental quality and tread the fine line between folk tune and classical piece. Don’t be Lazy is an incredible tune, it’s hushed and eventually spirals away to nothingness.

Sweeney’s latest album, Escape That, is a noisy, electric guitar drenched thing of wonder. His fiddle becomes part of something much bigger and grander.

Pink Steps is the only tune that he plays from that tonight and it is, obviously, stripped of the bombast. It becomes slighter and lighter but the tune shines.

Equally a set which starts with an old Bellowhead tune, Jack Lintel, leaves aside the noise and creates something gently foot-tapping. Considering this is just one man and four violins it is utterly entrancing.

Sweeney seems slightly taken aback that a roomful of people wants to listen to a whole set of solo fiddle tunes. When they’re played with such skill and such virtuosity it’s not really that hard to see why we would.

Tunes from the incredible Unfinished Violin album nestle next to instrumentals from Leveret, one of Sweeney’s other bands, and old tunes that he just seems to have collected along the way.

After almost every one he smiles, says “I love that one” and then launches off into another story or more gentle musings. Sam Sweeney’s love of fiddle tunes is completely infectious, proving that there is nothing cooler.

Main photo: Gavin McNamara

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