Afternoon:
15°c
Rick Pearson's rating
, The Leisure Society meet The Heritage Orchestra, Barbican - review
By
Rick Pearson
9 Dec 2011
Like cheese and wine, or Pete Doherty and the law courts, some things are made for one another. You can now add to that list The Leisure Society and the Heritage Orchestra.
The seven-piece band, whose two albums - The Sleeper and Into The Murky Water - gained them praise from everyone from Elbow's Guy Garvey to Brian Eno, are hardly lacking in number.
But the 34-strong orchestra, complete with a renegade conductor who had only the previous night "thrown a shoe at a barman", added an extra level of grandeur to their bucolic back catalogue.
Built upon the close harmonies of Nick Hemming and Christian Hardy, The Leisure Society's songs possess a timeless quality, which attracted an audience of folkies young and old.
The Last of the Melting Snow, nominated for an Ivor Novello award for best song in 2009, nodded to Neil Young's Only Love Can Break Your Heart, while This Phantom Life showcased Hemming's way with a wordy lyric. "You can hide your desperation from yourself and from your children but you cannot control your terror or your loss of poise and diction," he crooned, as cymbals crashed and strings soared.
If God Gave Me A Choice harked back to the years when Hemming, who enjoyed fleeting fame as part of early Nineties indie band She Talks To Angels, was struggling to make it in the music industry.
Singing it at a packed out Barbican was seemingly so overwhelming that he forgot half of its first verse.
However, he'd regained himself in time for a cover of Erasure's synthpop anthem A Little Respect, re-imagined here as a lilting folk-rock ballad.
Like everything last night, it worked a treat.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
