Richard Dawson and Lankum are a canny pairing for tonight, the latter’s headline show at the Hammersmith Apollo. They both write and perform from a place that is at once modern and entirely folkloric, reviving the ancient to make real those old feelings and sentiments again.
To be in the Apollo a bit before Dawson is due to take the stage, it hardly feels like he’s the support; it’s already almost entirely full, and when they eventually start their set, Lankum pay tribute to ‘the genius that is Richard Dawson’, thanking him for sharing the bill. Dawson, as ever, is charmingly self-deprecating, though when he walks onstage and without a word launches into ‘The Almsgiver’, a song which he performs a capella without ever losing tune or momentum, he captivates the busy audience from the first note; holding them there in the palm of his hand.
It’s an evening of good stage patter, a lesson to sullen indie bands who keep their heads down and thrash. For their part, Lankum spark a debate between themselves as to whether takeaway pizzas existed in the 1970s, which results in the crowd weighing in from various corners of the large venue.
From the moment they begin, Lankum play with the tension between their own levity and the weight of their material. Often dealing with the darker sides of humanity, whether jilted lovers driven to suicide or murderous sea captains, the sounds emitting from the stage are rolling with doom. The moment the drones come in in ‘Netta Perseus’ or ‘The Wild Rover’ is like a punch to the chest; the audience is almost visibly blown backwards, faces raised a touch more in admiration, overcome by the force of it all. Softer moments from 2023’s False Lankum like ‘Clear Away in the Morning’ or ‘Newcastle’ are absent from this set, but the appearance of ‘Master Crowley’s’ and ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ are met with raucous foot-stomping in the stalls.
It’s too easy to say that Lankum’s world is nightmarish, because it contains all the quotidian miseries and pleasures of a life that is regular. One example is ‘On a Monday Morning’, a song by Cyril Tawney and released on his 1972 album In Port. Lankum’s version exacerbates the existential hungover dread, layering it against the now horrendously ordinary scenes of waiting for a bus or being wrenched from the bed of the one you love to go to work.
In the dread, there is lightness too; to feel dreadful about these things is to acknowledge their value, or at least what ought to matter more. Nowhere is this more evident in the set than when the band perform two songs for Palestine, a truncated version of ‘The Rocks of Palestine’ and ‘The Peatbog Soldiers’, the stage lights going red, white and green.
On their album ‘Live in Dublin’, the band joke about opening up a rift in the space-time continuum. It’s a joke that holds some truth to it: they perform three songs as an encore and end up playing well beyond the expected 10.30 curfew. Never does it drag, and never are the audience distracted or wishing inwardly for it to end. They don’t mind being half an hour late for their tube home. To close, Lankum end on ‘Go Dig My Grave’, and a ghostly echo of Radie Peat’s voice comes back through the audience, all singing at a low volume along with her. If not a rift in the space time continuum, then a séance maybe: a space held for souls long gone and those still here.
