There is a ghostly air about the two premier events in the Barbican's English Originals festival, with near-forgotten spirits summoned up in verse and the fascinating contours of ancient black and white faces highlighted on a vast screen above the stage. The idea, for both evenings, is to rescue the troubled souls of English folk music, preserve their legacy for a new generation. But that is where the comparisons between Topic's 60th birthday celebrations and the Nick Drake tribute concert end.
Despite a remarkably undemonstrative audience, the Topic Night feels like a family party from start to finish. Waterson/Carthy, with their enormous, honest voices, host the entire thing like the downhome gypsies you most want to be cooked dinner by after a wet afternoon lost on the Yorkshire moors. Dick Gaughan tells interminable-but-likeable jokes and sings stern, lingering songs about the plight of the working man. Bert Jansch picks his acoustic guitar with dexterity pitched somewhere between a brain surgeon and an Olympic origami champion. Eliza Carthy's band provide refreshing youth and, in the case of the beautiful Lucy Adams, terrific clog-dancing.
The community spirit, paradoxically, is kept constant by a carefully observed rule where the main protagonist in your song must die. A daughter's body is found buried in a remote barn after a mother receives a visitation in a dream. A nine-year-old girl withers away down a mine shaft.
Strangely, it is the performances where the protagonists survive which provide the evening's lowlights: Roy Bailey's cheeky-chappie travelogues grate severely, and Tom Robinson's all-acoustic, no-microphone-for-me-I'm-a-folk-martyr bellow through Blood Brother is over-earnest and incongruous. But it is not enough to spoil a rare thing: a tribute concert which serves a purpose - writing a much-maligned form of British music back into the history books.
Nick Drake, on the other hand, doesn't need rescuing from the dustbin of time; that has already been done by a gradual accumulation of critical acclaim throughout the 90s - the result of which is that he is now not only more popular than he ever was in his lifetime, but maybe just a smidgen over-rated?
He has got some very talented fans: Gomez, Seattle's Damien Jurado, Stephen Duffy, Richard Thompson. But unfortunately, not many of them are here tonight. Bernard Butler and Ben And Jason can replicate Drake's fragile chords to near-perfection, but not his ghoulish aura. Too cool for their own good, they also seem over-intent on being Drake tonight - neglecting (in stark contrast to the Topic night) to speak to the audience or introduce the performer who replaces them on stage - and ultimately come across as angst-rock elves doing a nondescript dance around the feet of a folk giant.
True, this might be the only chance we get to hear these songs together in a large venue, but the fact remains: they were custom-made for bedsits.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable
** Mediocre * Terrible
