Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: This is the first time that the Siobhan Miller Band has been on tour, apparently. Salut! Live caught them at King’s Place in London—they’d played Liverpool the night before and were on the way to Manchester the next day, so they were probably not saying nice things on the bus about their booking agent.

The English leg of the tour is done now, but they have a cluster of gigs in Scotland in December still to come. The King’s Place concert was part of the venue’s hugely successful Scotland Unwrapped series. 

Siobhan Miller has a decent number of albums now to pick a set from—five under her own name and another couple with Jeanna Leslie—and the set includes songs from across her musical history.

She mixes songs from the folk tradition—ancient and modern—with songs that she has written, sometimes collaborating with Innes White or her husband, Euan Burton, both of whom were on stage with her.

All of this was on display here. She opened with Queen of Argyll, written by Andy M. Stewart, and went into I’m a Rover, which is an old Scots song. The Scots theme continued with the traditional song Tranent, learned from Rod Paterson, who died earlier this year. The lyric is in Scots dialect and the band played it as if they were in a session, accelerating as they got towards the end.

(A great view of the Siobhan Miller Band from the Stage Balcony seating. From left to right: Charlie Stuart, Innes White, Siobhan Miller, Niamh Corkey, Louis Abbott, Euan Burton, and Tom Gibbs. Photo: Andrew Curry. CC BY-SA-NC 4.0)

As well as Innes White on guitar—he’s one of the great sidemen of Scots folk music—and Euan Burton on bass, the band includes Charlie Stuart on violin, Tom Gibbs on keyboards, and Louis Abbott on drums. The young singer-songwriter Niamh Corkey, who had opened the concert, reappeared on stage from time to time to sing backing vocals.

It turns out that Siobhan Millar is from Tranent, which is a small town in East Lothian, near Edinburgh. It has an industrial heritage but is now largely a commuter town. Was there anyone from Tranent in the house tonight? There wasn’t.

She followed Tranent with some of her own songs—Sorrow When The Day Is Done and If I had Known, before going into a couple of recent singles that were a lot more poppy.

This included Over Again and The Club of Squandered Youth, which was mentioned here by Colin Randall a couple of weeks ago.

Miller told an interviewer recently that although she spent a lot of time in folk clubs when she was young, as a girl—like other 1990s girls—she “was mad for Take That and the Spice Girls”, although at the end of the second one she announced that the “80s pop disco” was now over.

The mix on this part of the set wasn’t great where I was sitting, although that was probably because a ticketing glitch (my fault, not the venue’s) meant we were up on the Stage Balcony, not in the body of the hall. There is a great view of the band from there, though.

Siobhan Miller started her career early. She was being chaperoned around folk clubs by her father from the age of 13, and joked at one point—I think she was joking—that she had played every folk club in England. But one of the things you learn from that 20-year apprenticeship is how to build a set.

And this set was expertly constructed, taking us into the newer, less folky material in the middle, and then reassuring us that we were still at a folk gig by coming to the front of the stage—“welcome to the King’s Place folk club”—with Innes White, Charlie Stuart and Euan Burton to sing an unamplified version of Bonny Light Horseman.

To cap that she reminded us of her own trad roots by leaving the stage to Stuart and White so they could play a set of tunes that included one written by the great Scots violinist Duncan Chisholm. It was like a big punctuation mark halfway through the set.

Where Siobhan Miller stands out for me is in her interpretation of other people’s songs, and the arrangements here with the band underlined this.

As she moved towards the close, she went into Ed Pickford’s A Pound A Week Rise, followed by Si Kahn’s What You Do With What You’ve Got, which she learnt from Dick Gaughan, and then Open All Night, by the late Rab Noakes. These built on each other, creating a real momentum in the hall.

Each of these versions, I’d say, was better than her recorded versions. In particular, the drummer Louis Abbott drove the band along on “A Pound of Week Rise”, underlining the anger in Pickford’s song—it’s about a betrayal, after all. And again, Open All Night, the final song of the main set, was a bigger song than her recorded version, with the band vamping the middle eight as she introduced them to us.

Of course there was an encore. First, One Too Many Mornings. She sings it slower than Dylan, Tom Gibbs filled in a bell-like riff on the keyboards which added atmosphere, and Miller nodded to the fact that Dylan was playing at the same time on the other side of London.

She finished as she started with Andy M. Stewart, this time with her signature song Rambling Rover. It’s her most played song on Spotify, and by this time we were singing along with the chorus. Of course we were.

(Source: SiobhanMiller.com.)

I should add a word about Niamh Corkey’s opening set. She’s a singer-songwriter who mostly plays quiet reflective songs written from her experience. She’s got a good voice and plays decent guitar, and didn’t bother to hide her delight at being on the stage at King’s Place and, come to that touring with Siobhan Miller, as if all her Christmases had come early (and nothing wrong with that). The audience certainly took to her.

The song that she played by her grandfather—an emigrant’s lament about being in Scotland and thinking of Ireland—mixed things up a bit. She’s only been performing for about a year, she said; adding in some more songs to her set from other people would help broaden the range.