Greed is a common but not especially attractive human condition to which, in the context of my sentiments as I made my way home, I must plead guilty.
Tabor had been magnificent throughout, when singing solo as well as alongside the Oysters’ excellent frontman John Jones and the accomplished band. The strength, perfect phrasing and sheer beauty of her singing would have impressed an audience watching a woman of 27 led alone one who will be 77 on New Year’s Eve.
But with so much Tabor to squeeze into the set list, there simply wasn’t time for as much pure Oysterband as I would have liked. How else, you may ask, could it be? From the original Oyster Ceilidh Band to Oyster Band and the space-deleted Oysterband, then with Tabor, there have been well over 30 albums, live recordings and compilations included.
A natural response to my minor reservation is that I was at the wrong concert. The series of appearances with Tabor complete, Oysterband now resume the main programme of farewells, in England and then Denmark and Germany, when the band can dip more liberally into that bulging back catalogue.
And what we did hear was uniformly good. The opener Where the World Divides encouraged enough audience participation to serve as an instant reminder that we were in the company of confirmed fans. From eight rows back, the immediate view - grey, white and bald heads (mine among them) - attested to the age profile of this sell-out crowd.
When Tabor then shuffled on stage, the first impression was that this goddess of English folk was surely not sufficiently robust to be on tour.
How false that impression was. She slipped into a flawless version of Si Kahn’s brooding Mississippi Summer, the voice as sturdy and sensuous as ever.
Ian Telfer, the Oysters' fiddler, remarked that a young Tabor had longed to be Francoise Hardy, later Nico; my own observation is that she sings 10 times better than did either of those fine artists and is in addition an Oxford graduate in their languages, French and German.
There were other highlights before and after the interval. Jones and Tabor’s duet for The Joy Division classic of broken love, Love Will Tear Us Apart, was breathtaking, Bonnie Susie Cleland an outstanding folk-rock ballad of paternal evil in the face of a daughter's forbidden choice of lover. In this ancient Scottish variant of honour killing, the unfortunate victim was burned at the stake; the song is melodic, rousing and infectious all the same.
A slice of 1960s rock - a cover of Jefferson Airplane's
White Rabbit, no less, was the first encore. The finale was an Oysterband anthem,
Put Out the Lights, the chorus still on people's lips as they headed for the otherwise joyless walk back to the Tube.
One snapshot from a superb concert lingers in the mind. Hills of Shiloh is a haunting song of a widow's lament over one of the deaths that occurred on an industrial scale in the American Civil War. It was written a century after the Shiloh battle by Shel Silverstein and Jim Friedman. Tabor has sung it with Martin Simpson and it appeared on Ragged Kingdom, her second album with the band. Here it required only her voice and Alan Prosser, an Oyster founder member, on guitar.
As singer and accompanist treated the song with the sensitivity and respect it deserved, other band members could be seen in ghostly silhouette, watching in what seemed rapt admiration from the wing.
It's not a bad memory to take away from a musical experience of superior quality. I did miss The Shouting End of Life, Don't Slit Your Wrists For Me, The World Turned Upside Down and more. These - plus By Northern Light, which we did hear - featured on the album named after the first of those songs. It was released in 1995, five years after the first album with Tabor, Freedom and Rain, inspired the belated appreciation of the band that led me to describe them, when The Daily Telegraph's folk writer, in these terms: "No other folk rock band has the magneticism and verve of the Oysters live."
Still feeling irrationally greedy, I see a possible remedy. There may be a strong case for the editor of Salut! Live to catch one of those gigs in Denmark or Germany.
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