The Young ‘Uns do Christmas their way
December 30, 2023
We haven’t featured the Teesside three-piece The Young ‘Uns here on Salut! Live before, although Jez Lowe namechecked them in an interview we did a couple of years ago.
They brought their usual mix of a capella singing and onstage energy to a Christmas tour that mixed up traditional folk songs, mainstream standards and their own seasonal songs.
Salut! Live’s deputy editor Andrew Curry squeezed in to one of the few empty seats ...
Image: folkimages.com
The first thing to say is that this was a proper Christmas concert. London’s Cecil Sharp House was decorated with sparkly tinsel all around the concert hall, with a Christmas tree hung above the stage.
There was a sardonic announcement before the band came on stage, voiced by Matthew Crampton, telling us that this was a Christmas show and introducing them as “the three wey-ayes men from the North East”. You see what they did just there. And there was even a Christmas jumper onstage.
The repertoire was definitely Christmassy, including some wassail songs, some re-worked carols, and some seasonal songs, some written by The Young ‘Uns, some mainstream, some learned from others. Even for a Christmas music fan like me, quite a lot of these songs were new. And the place was absolutely packed.
This was the sixth show of a quick Christmas tour by the Young ‘Uns, and the night before they had been playing in a Methodist Church in Durham, next door to an Air Cadets fundraiser. The Young ‘Uns, for anyone who doesn’t know them, are a three person group from Teeside — David Eagle, Sean Cooney, and Michael Hughes — who wandered into a folk club as teenagers 20 years ago and never completely left. They sing a lot of their songs a capella, though a few instruments sometimes appear — accordion, keyboards, guitar.
I first came across them, I think, on Matthew Bannister’s Folk on Foot podcast, where they took Bannister on a tourof the high spots of Hartlepool, and sang some songs about the town.
At Cecil Sharp House, they opened with Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy (“from Cornwall via Hull”), one of a couple of Watersons’ songs in the set. They were also quick to set our expectations, letting us know that “we’re not ususally in the habit of singing long songs about God.” I’m not going to run through the setlist, but I liked the way they were always careful to pay their dues to the people they learn from.
Some of the highlights, then:
Two Christmas songs they had written based on the oral histories that Richard van Emden collected from World War One veterans, neither of which was about the Christmas Truce. The first told the story of a British soldier still in Germany at Christmas 1918 giving some tobacco as a present to a German farmer, the second was an improbable tale about two geese, Jimmy and Jane, who were being fattened for Christmas but didn’t get eaten. This song had been developed through some work the band is doing with primary schools, and the chorus came with some tricky actions.
The set of wassail songs in the second half had a real energy about them (another Watersons song tucked in here from Frost and Fire, along with the Yorkshire Wassail, from the Middlesbrough singer Richard Grainger) and it ended with Jez Lowe’s ‘Wor Sale’, a contemporary north-eastern post-Christmas pun from a show where The Young ‘Uns had sung the advertisements between the songs.
Somewhere in there was a song by the radical songwriter Sydney Carter that wasn’t either John Ball or Lord of the Dance. Standing in the Rain had the kind of political edge that is more usually associated with The Young ‘Uns usual repertoire.
A traditional song they had learned from John and Joy Rennie, who run the Stockton Folk Club, about a clipper captain trying to get his ship and crew home for Christmas. Impossible to find this online, but it was a fine song in the nautical tradition that worked well a capella.
The more mainstream covers were good too: Jona Lewie’s Stop The Cavalry is grimly topical this year, and they managed to make David Essex’s song A Winter’s Tale a lot less schmaltzy.
David Eagle, who also performs as a standup comedian, is genuinely funny as he chats between the numbers. The poor woman whose phone went off as they were about to play Tim Burman, their “one serious song” of the evening, in memory of someone who died in the Lockerbie plane bombing, was given a merciless time. “The next one’s in C, if you want to tune your mobile phones,” was just the start of it.
I’m not always a huge fan of a capella folk singing. It can sound anaemic, especially without a decent crowd on stage. But The Young ‘Uns all have great voices, and their arrangements certainly filled the hall. The accompanied songs mix the sound up. They also bring a likeable energy and a lot of humanity to their sets. In his review of their concert in Warwick, Andy Thorley describes them as “life affirming”, and I don’t think that’s too strong.
For their encore, they invited people to call out Christmas songs. I suspect they were waiting for people to say the ones they had rehearsed, although David Eagle, now on keyboards, made a game effort to remember some of Merry Christmas Baby. But what we actually got was the entendre-laden Who’s Stuffing Your Turkey This Christmas, which Matthew Crampton appeared on stage to lead on, White Christmas and Fairytale of New York.
Everyone sang along with that, because everyone knows the words now. It’s a folksong for our times.
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