Seth Lakeman, St James’s Church - music review

It was a dramatic opening. A darkened stage with slow, thumping drum beats and insistent violin chords. The lights came on to illuminate the glorious vaulted space of Sir Christopher Wren’s church and Lakemen launched into The Courier, from his new album Word of Mouth. But the words of this enigmatic moorland journey were inaudible in the mix.

Seth Lakeman released his first solo album, The Punch Bowl, in 2002 and won a Mercury nomination in 2005 for his second, Kitty Jay. He sings, plays violin, guitar and several other instruments and is a poster boy of English folk. There is a muscular urgency about his singing, his performance and his music. And Word of Mouth, his seventh solo album, was actually recorded in a Cornish church. The music is about people and their stories and on the album every word is clear. But most of the lyrics were lost last night.

He also included older pieces, such as Solomon Browne, one of his signature songs about a Cornish lifeboat disaster and, as he said, very relevant in the current conditions in the South-West as the railway line at Dawlish, in Devon, is washed away.

I don’t think the church was the problem. St James’s has a great acoustic and the two songs Lakeman sang with his violin alone and a duo with band member Lisbee Stainton sounded fantastic. It was the vocals with the full band that were a mess. But the spontaneous ceilidh beneath the stained glass windows at the end looked great.