With the Spitz putting out tables and chairs, and with other audience members strewn all over the floor, the first night of the venue’s last ever Festival of Folk was pretty low-key.

Alasdair Roberts’s mournful balladry didn’t exactly improve the mood, but that’s not to say one was not awestruck by Roberts’s songs and effortless playing.
Not too many artists use different tunings for every song they perform, Roberts expertly running the full gamut of folk stylistics if providing long pauses between songs.

Newest album The Amber Gatherers is comparatively joyful compared with his previous No Earthly Man, and it is this recent work that is most on show tonight – ‘Riddle Me This, ‘Waxwing’ and in particular The King’s Hand’ proving that Roberts is perhaps above all of the current folk breed the most qualified - in his story-telling and technical skill – for comparison with the likes Martin Carthy and Bert Jansch.

Roberts is so slight that you have to look at him twice to realise he is not just a floating head, and is unassuming on stage to the point of being apologetic. It seems that Roberts is a melancholy young man, and despite the relative positivity of his LP seems afflicted with that same horror at the modern age that afflicted Nick Drake or more contemporarily, Conor Oberst. He states after ‘Riddle Me This’: “That was about the battle between knowledge and wisdom. It seems we live with knowledge today, I’m hoping for a return to wisdom… but I’m not hopeful.”

After a brief encore, he left the stage for his CD table, taking compliments from punters with a resigned bleakness in his eyes. Like all sublime acoustic music, Alasdair Roberts deals in pain, but makes it sound beautiful.

Barnaby Smith