Bellowhead - Bellowhead Live: The Farewell Tour (2016)

Big band Bellowhead have a fair claim to being the most significant folk performers on the scene during their eleven year run. They would never be mistaken for anything but a folk band as they remained true to their roots and performed all manner of traditional material. But they did it in a way that hadn’t been done before. Their music was a full-on assault: loud, fizzing with energy, frequently mad, always entertaining. And they took that music to places other folk performers could only dream of: sell-out tours in big venues and decent slots at non-folk festivals as well as the expected runs at the likes of Cambridge and Shrewsbury. And this is the key to the band. While every one of their studio albums is outstanding and last year’s compilation “Pandemonium” a fine introduction, it was in the live arena that they truly shone. No matter the audience, from hard core folkies to people who would normally run a mile from “folk”, they won them over with the power of their live shows and the fact that every gig basically turned into a party driven along by the twenty-two-legged groove machine on stage.

Released to coincide with the second and final leg of their farewell tour this is a handsome package and a bargain to boot. For little more than the price of a single album you get a double live one with twenty-nine tracks and a 23 track DVD recorded at Leicester’s De Montfort Hall on the tour’s first leg. The musicianship is exemplary as the band have always boasted some of the finest players out there, the arrangements innovative and the playing wild. And of course in Jon Boden they have one of the finest frontmen of this or any genre. Highlights are everywhere, lowlights are non-existent, and while many will point to the thunderous “Jordan”, the joyous “Roll The Woodpile Down” or the madness of “London Town” as favourites, and rightly so, its perhaps the unexpected that leaves the deepest mark, and for this reviewer that’s the acapella take of Richard Thompson’s “Down Where the Drunkards Roll” that ends the DVD. They used to say that working in advertising was as much fun as you can have with your clothes on. They were wrong, or at least had never been to a Bellowhead gig. They will be sorely missed. Remember them this way.