Rising star Katherine Priddy dropped in at Rough Trade on Tuesday night to sign copies of her new album, and play a few songs. Once again, the Nottingham audience provided a warm reception …
“Wow, that was the most enthusiastic welcome I’ve received all week!” exclaims Katherine Priddy, blinking in response to a typically loud Nottingham cheer from the packed Rough Trade live room.
This was Katherine’s final stop on a mini-signing tour to celebrate the launch of her second album, The Pendulum Swing. The album has received glowing reviews from mainstream critics as well as folk publications, and, as Katherine told LeftLion a couple of weeks ago, is one which demonstrates a new maturity in its songwriting and themes. It’s a very personal album, as Katherine explained several times during her Rough Trade set.
Alone on stage with her acoustic guitar, Katherine emanates a relaxed warmth from the start, launching into Does She Hold You LIke I Did after a few soft words of introduction. Her vocals hit home instantly: she has an amazing ability to switch into top-quality singing from the first moment, calming and focusing all minds in the room. Such is her vocal purity that you’d be hard pressed to distinguish her live from her recorded voice, but listening closely there is a certain enrichment. She also makes good use of her accurate ear, sometimes allowing the sound of her voice to blend almost imperceptibly into the resonance of her finger-picked guitar notes.
Over the next half hour, Katherine performs stripped back, intimate versions of many of the songs from her new album, dropping some interesting titbits of information along the way. She explains that First House on the Left includes samples of incidental house-noises, and how this idea was inspired by the cash-register sounds on Pink Floyd’s Money. She trails Anyway, Always by explaining that the answerphone message at the start is “the sort of message you’d want to leave for someone after a couple of glasses of wine”. Afterwards, she comments that the song is still so new that she wasn’t sure where to breathe when singing it. This is a lovely, intimate and quite sensual piece of music, and as Katherine sings it (as with all of her songs tonight) you see and hear how she enters fully into the moment, eyes almost closed, focusing on each word and note.
“Making an album is particularly personal, but once it’s released it’s not yours any more. I just hope you enjoy it,” says Katherine, frankly.
I’d already listened to The Pendulum Swing a few times before the gig, and I knew it came from a personal place - but I hadn’t appreciated quite to what extent. The songs feature less of the abstract or more typically “folk” themes and are instead firmly about family, a sense of place, and home; they express deep emotions including some striking vulnerability.
Walnut Shell is introduced as written for her twin brother, reflecting on his move to New Zealand: “It really hurt, and he’d better hurt too - I want to make him cry,” she says with a wry chuckle. Father of Two is - yes - for her dad (she sings the melody skilfully over harmonies in the guitar’s bass notes); A Boat on the River expresses Katherine’s longing to live on a canal boat in the form of a carefully crafted, more traditionally structured folk piece; and Northern Sunrise is “a love song”.
These little snippets of insight, and the way she imparts them so naturally and openly, add a very personal element to the performance. Katherine is doing very well at the moment, and it’s obvious that she’s going on to even greater things, but for a short time she welcomes us into her inner circle, and that’s a lovely place to be.
During the final few minutes of her set, Katherine takes requests from her first album. This elicits a performance of Eurydice, a song she wrote as a teenager but now performs with several years of experience under her belt. She sings through the beautiful melodies delicately but with rich and resonant lower notes. And then, to close, it’s Indigo. Katherine forgets some lyrics a couple of times, which goes to show just how immersed in the new album she’s been recently. It doesn’t matter: Katherine is typically unfazed, and no one else cares. It’s all part of the joy of a close-up show like this to be able to share in every moment of the performance.
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