As it was Valentine’s night, Sam Lee kindly tipped us off when he got to his first love song. “It’s about two lovers re-uniting,” he said, “but the difference between them is he is dead and she is not.”
A lot of the songs he sings have an interesting twist, and Sam Lee always has a quirky story to tell about them.
Lee is the most arresting new arrival on the British folk music scene — a Mercury Music Prize nominee last year. He collects the songs himself, mainly from travellers and gipsies, but not just in rural areas such as Cecil Sharp, but from an Irish travellers’ encampment under the A40 in Shepherd’s Bush, where he heard Phoenix Island from Thomas McCarthy.
Lee has a magnetism when he performs because these songs have now become a part of him. “I’ll tell you for why ...” he sings, and you listen.
Although the songs may be hundreds of years old, they sound new — it’s partly Lee’s engagement but also the novel arrangements. The “Friends” in the band play violin, cello, trumpet, Japanese koto and Indian tabla, so the sound is contemporary rather than “folky”.
Each song has its own sound world, and Lee makes us listen to our own music as if it’s something new. That’s some achievement.
At Cecil Sharp House, N1 (020 7485 2206, efdss.org) on Feb 15 (returns only) and the Tabernacle, W11 on Feb 16 (020 7221 9700; tabernaclew11.com)