Sam Lee at The Glasshouse, Gateshead.

Sam Lee
The Glasshouse, (Formerly The Sage)
Gateshead
23/3/2024

Saturday nights in these parts are notoriously bawdy, hedonistic affairs, and on this March Saturday, the wind chill was so unforgiving that even before Sam Lee uttered a word, just stepping inside Gateshead’s Glasshouse felt like being cocooned in a warm, expansive sanctuary.
Very much a place far removed from the microclimate on the streets just across the River Tyne.
What followed was a journey into Sam Lee’s world of nature, tradition and conservationism. He’s authored an acclaimed book called The Nightingale and throughout the spring he leads campfire nights of folklore, whilst listening to this particular endangered species.
Taking us there on this chilly Tyneside night was not an easy task but with the help of his iPhone and his superb band he largely succeeded.

Talking of bawdy; Sam Lee has an intriguing backstory that involves exotic dancing in the West End of London.
On leaving Chelsea School of Art he had combined performing in hot pants and glitter at burlesque club nights, while during the day researching traditional songs at Cecil Sharp House (the headquarters of the English Folk Society).
A ‘double life’ as he puts it, which involved ‘being surrounded by dancing girls, attaching their nipple tassels and learning songs by old shepherds’.

The nights opener Green Mossy Banks was written for the movie The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry but wasn’t used as part of the soundtrack, while the following song, McCrimmon, a dramatic, sweeping soundscape was included in the film.
Both tunes are lifted from his most recent release Songdreaming, which he states is about our ‘interconnectedness with the land’.
Nature plays a starring role in most of his tunes, be it in the form of a bird, the moon or the healing power of plants. These sometimes-lengthy songs comprise many of folk music’s traditional themes.; Love and Death are portrayed in Sweet Girl McRee and Lay This Body Down, a song that includes a beautiful three-part harmony.

His set involves a mix of stories and songs, several of which had been handed down from previous generations. A self-declared ‘collector of songs’ tonight wasn’t a gig as much as it was an evening of learning and contemplation.
‘The Gypsies are our Native Americans: they practise a kind of shamanism mixed with Christianity and the old beliefs’ he explains.
Throughout, we are told about people such as Freda Black and the Connors family. The former, a deceased Romani Gypsy who, during the early 1900s had learned folk ballads from her grandparents; the latter an Irish traveller clan, headed by Nan and Buffalo Connors who taught Lee songs that had been in their families for generations, going unwritten and unrecorded, passed down via the oral tradition. Tonight Sam performed The Moon Shines Bright, a Gypsy blessing song, which he learned from the aforementioned Freda Black, combining it seamlessly with the well-known standard Wild Mountain Thyme (the recorded and video versions feature the now rarely heard Liz Fraser of Cocteau Twins fame).

Throughout, the content draws strongly on the folk tradition, case in point ‘Aye Walking Oh’ (an adaption of the Robbie Burns poem Ay Waukin O).
However, the musical arrangements are spectacular and fall somewhere between contemporary classical, prog and jazz, with the fiddle melodies being the most obvious nod to what we think of as Folk Music.
It all adds up to sounding like a live session on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, or as MOJO put it [songdreaming is] ‘an autumn-toned tour de force, it melds yoga pants-era Bill Callahan pondering, the twittering rhapsodies of Kate Bush’s Aerial and Incredible String Band cosmic wonder.’

Live, Sam Lee’s main instrument is his voice, he sounds like a restrained opera singer at times – on occasions he sits and plays a shruti box for added drone, at other times he stands and puts into practice his dance moves.
The iPhone was used once only, and that was Sam’s way of bringing the sweet song of the nightingale to Hall Two.
His band is excellent, comprising Louis Campbell (guitar and vocal), Joseph O’Keefe (violin), Joshua Green (drums), and Rob Dimbleby on grand piano and vocal.

They play 13 songs in total, including a deserved encore, which Sam introduces as an Aberdeen Song. ‘Lovely Molly’ is a fitting tribute to the many singers who have passed songs from one generation to another. It was Jeannie Robertson who made Lovely Molly famous – a song that featured on the 1963 Prestige release The Cuckoo’s Nest and Other Scottish Folk Songs. Sam had input from Jeannie’s nephew Stanley Robertson on the version that appears on his 2020 album Old Wow.

It has to be said; folk music is not what you would describe as all the rage with the masses these days. Yes, the Folk scene is cool within a certain section of society, which makes the way Sam Lee has gone about building this collection of songs impressively authentic and he has spent years tracking down people from traveller communities. For a well-spoken Englishman, building these relationships and establishing a level of trust with such a marginalised group of people must have been a daunting endeavour, yet equally rewarding.

For my money, Sam Lee is currently Britain’s finest folk singer and one of the most persuasive conservationist voices of his generation; there are others, such as Iona Lane and Johnny Campbell (who opened for him the following night in Leeds) whose material focuses on the natural world.
Though it is Sam Lee who brings contemporary Folk Music back to where much of it came: Roma Gypsies and Scottish and Irish Travellers.
Before he left us tonight, Sam draws a parallel with the decimation of nature to that of the live music terrain and the need for us all to come together to arrest this decline.
It is a message that we all need to pay attention to before it’s too late.

Review by William Graham
https://samleesong.co.uk/