Matthew Walton’s Blog

Well, Karine Polwart with special guest Martha Tilston. One could disparagingly say that Martha Tilston was the support act, but she was far too good for that sort of description. As Karine said, wasn’t that a great way to start the night! It’s a shame they didn’t start on time, but it was worth the wait.

The Maze is a nice small venue on Mansfield Road, which lends a great feel to proceedings and a real sense of interaction between the performers and the audience. Martha Tilston appears to be a talented songwriter and a very impressive singer. She was also having ridiculous amounts of fun, especially when singing “A Surfer Courted Me”, which is her reworking of the classic folk song “Blacksmith”. I recommend googling her… there’s a free album of hers to download which has three songs she performed last night on it — the aforementioned “A Surfer Courted Me”, “Artificial” which is about working in an office, and “Corporations” which got a lot of laughs with the lyrics in the chorus.

I bought the CD as well though.

So once we were thoroughly warmed up by Martha and her band (they’re coming to the Rescue Rooms later in the year, I might go and see them again), Karine and her band appeared and played a fantastic set, including some songs from projects unrelated to her two albums. It’s always fun to sing along with songs like “I’m Gonna Do It All” and “The Sun’s Comin’ Over The Hill”, something she encourages. There were a couple of interesting technical glitches during the evening, including a bizarre buzzing sound in the middle of one of Martha’s song, which was apparently caused by the violin pickups, and some strange guitar things going on in the middle of Karine’s set, but everything was sorted out and we all had a good laugh about it.

You probably couldn’t get away with that somewhere bigger.

Now I just wish that today wasn’t one of the days when Banshee refuses to see my iPod, because I really want to get Martha’s stuff onto it. Sigh. Gotta dig in and try and bugfix that I think.