The Churchfitters

When one is invited to a musical event at the Garboldisham Village Hall (and if one is me, which might be even less of a shared experience), one might be forgiven for wondering if one is in for a long, long, evening. I left Seattle last month with just such an invitation in hand, fresh from experiencing The. Worst. Live. Band. In. Seattle – possibly in all creation, so I may have been more concerned than I would have been otherwise.

Carolyn White, John Thurgood and I arrived in Garboldisham at a quarter to seven on a Saturday night in late January, and had no problem finding good seats towards the front of the hall. In fact there were so few people in evidence that we feared the acts would be playing to a sparse audience. We soon learned we had arrived an hour early due to misinformation in the local paper, and by a quarter to eight, every seat had been claimed, and the bar was doing a good business in Old Chimneys Ale, a local brew.

The opening band was a husband-and-wife duo at least the equal of T.W.L.B.I.S. They sang original but indifferently-composed-and-written songs, and while she could sing and he could play, she was so enamored of her own style and so in her own head during her performance that she did sing-along numbers flourished up with her own vocal meanderings that had the audience totally unsure where to go next. Good singers have rapport with the people they’re singing to; this woman, despite having a lovely voice, was not a good singer, in my opinion, at least as humble as the one in paragraph one. By the time they’d left the stage I had grown even more concerned with what I was going to hear for the next 90 minutes.

But history is not prophecy, and neither is the quality of the first act. The Churchfitters had me in the palms of their hands from the opening chords of the opening number. The spine of their music sounds like very solid and proficient Irish trad, but onto that they build every possible rock-blues-folk sound and more, including a bit of Breton flavor, and playing a staggering number of instruments, including hand-built bass viols and bass guitars created by Boris, the bass player, who might have come straight from an audition for an Addams Family revival.

The degree of sheer musicianship would have been impressive by itself, but the band is also practiced and tight and innovative and original and FUN. Though becoming better known all the time in the UK and France, they are not a worldwide phenomenon…yet.

The astounding live experience of The Churchfitters is not to be replicated in an audio-only medium, so have a butcher's at this. You can also listen to a wide variety of album tracks on their website, and if that prompts you to buy a CD and tell a friend, so much the better. On the way out the door I told Boris, “I’d go around the world to see you guys again.” I hope their fame grows and grows, so I won’t have to travel quite that far.