Rusby Offers Up A Pure Performance
When people talk about Kate Rusby’s voice, it’s no coincidence fans and reviewers alike describe her voice as pure. In these days of Auto-Tune and pitch-correcting technical tweaking, the crispness and clarity of her singing was a breath of fresh air at Showplace Performance Centre last night.
Folk Under the Clock artistic director Mike Barker introduced the concert by suggesting a temporary name change for the concert series. Since Showplace is filling in as the main venue during Market Hall’s renovations, these concerts “should really be called Folk Down the Block,” Barker said.
Known in the UK as the Barnesville Nightingale and described by The Guardian newspaper as a “superstar of the British acoustic scene,” Rusby lived up to her reputation by delivering to her audience a night of rich song, instrumental interludes and humorous anecdotes.
Rusby deftly presented a patchwork of songs about love and loss (with an aside that “folk songs are just like village gossip,”), her voice nicely complemented by band mates Damien O’Kane on acoustic guitars and banjo and Andy Seward on electric double bass.
For Rusby, music began as a family affair. As a youngster, she and her siblings traveled to folk festivals around the UK while her parents performed or her father worked on sound with other bands.
Now, Kate and partner Damien have their own 6-month old daughter, Daisy, in tow, under the watchful eye of granny and grandpa at a hotel in town. Rusby created her own record label Pure Records (named after the Greek meaning for Kate) that is family run. They’ll be traveling across Canada over the next two weeks before returning to the UK to headline at Edinburgh’s Ceilidh Culture festival.
The audience didn’t seem to mind the constant tuning between songs, as it allowed for more of Rusby’s quirky banter about everything from dragons and super-dogs and the danger of mothers with brooms.
Unfortunately, the shipment of Rusby CDs hadn’t arrived in Peterborough yesterday as expected, (though audiences were able to purchase O’Kane’s “Summer Hill”), but thanks to the internet, Rusby’s music can be purchased easily and quickly. Go to www.katerusby.com for info on all her albums.
Rusby’s was the penultimate performance in the 2009-2010 Folk Under the Clock concert season. The final show of the series Tuesday April 13th (also at Showplace) features Oysterband, “a folk band that likes to rock out,” according to Rolling Stone magazine. If you don’t know Oysterband, think again: Great Big Sea covered their song “When I’m Up (I Can’t Get Down)”, so expect a night of that same kind of energetic folk rock.