Gwyneth Herbert is a strikingly original performer, award-winning composer and lyricist and versatile mu sical adventurer who continues to redefine and challenge expectations. With one foot in the jazz world and the other somewhere in the future, she's worked in collaboration with writers, musicians, directors, choreographers, visual artists, academics, clowns, pirates and young people to make a huge cannon of genre-defying interdisciplinary work, as well as touring nationally and internationally with her band and releasing 6 albums to date on major, independent and self-owned labels.
Appearing here on vocals, ukulele, french horn and melodica, accompanied by her world-class quartet, Gwyneth takes you on a journey through her wide and varied musical world, revisiting songs from past albums, dipping into current theatrical projects and looking to the future. The first set will include some wistful numbers from her third and arguably most personal album - and the first UK release from legendary Blue Note Records in 30 years - Between Me and the Wardrobe, which Observer Music Monthly described as "***** Halfway between Janis Ian and Susanna And The Magical Orchestra". From All the Ghosts, there will be stories populated by a living, breathing cast of beaten-down dreamers, jaded city-dwellers, and women in a quandary: the walk back from the 277 night bus stop in Hackney at 2am, the East End boozer full of Bolshevik alcoholics clinging onto their pipe dreams, a Narrow Man in fishnets and a Mini on the M25....
read more
Gwyneth Herbert is a strikingly original performer, award-winning composer and lyricist and versatile mu sical adventurer who continues to redefine and challenge expectations. With one foot in the jazz world and the other somewhere in the future, she's worked in collaboration with writers, musicians, directors, choreographers, visual artists, academics, clowns, pirates and young people to make a huge cannon of genre-defying interdisciplinary work, as well as touring nationally and internationally with her band and releasing 6 albums to date on major, independent and self-owned labels.
Appearing here on vocals, ukulele, french horn and melodica, accompanied by her world-class quartet, Gwyneth takes you on a journey through her wide and varied musical world, revisiting songs from past albums, dipping into current theatrical projects and looking to the future. The first set will include some wistful numbers from her third and arguably most personal album - and the first UK release from legendary Blue Note Records in 30 years - Between Me and the Wardrobe, which Observer Music Monthly described as "***** Halfway between Janis Ian and Susanna And The Magical Orchestra". From All the Ghosts, there will be stories populated by a living, breathing cast of beaten-down dreamers, jaded city-dwellers, and women in a quandary: the walk back from the 277 night bus stop in Hackney at 2am, the East End boozer full of Bolshevik alcoholics clinging onto their pipe dreams, a Narrow Man in fishnets and a Mini on the M25.
The second set of this show will be a selection from Gwyneth's most recent and most ambitious recording project to date - The Sea Cabinet, a concept album in which the songs weave themselves around the imagined story of a woman who walks the beach every day alone, picking up all the discarded and washed up objects and taking them home, logging them with archeological rigour. She keeps them in a shack, her "sea cabinet", and each item resonates with the memory of a secret sea-set story. In this set we pay a visit to to faded seaside hotel The Regal, run by the ever-industrious Mrs Wittering, chandeliers hanging heavy with the ghosts of its glamourous glory days; join the Fifty Fishguard Ladies atop the chalk white clifftops, who alongside cobbler's wife Jemima Nicholas see off Napoleon’s invading fleets with a flash of their petticoats; be seduced by the mythical tale of brazen, alluring siren Lorelei, transferred into a modern context of dingy dives, cab rides and narcotics; move with the shifting sands of wartime Alderney, from its inhabitants’ sudden evacuation – fires left burning in the grates and wardrobes full of clothes - through the German occupation - the bang and the clunk of the 6000 labour camp inmates who sweat and toil, scarring its coastline with huge concrete buttresses - and finally to the emotional return of its erstwhile dwellers, who find the landscape of their home irreparably changed.
Expect songs that start a fire in your belly and a storm in your brain... that punch you in the face whilst tickling you under the chin... that make you think and laugh and cry... and the occasional Swahili sing-along!
***** “If Hans Eisler had been a woman and written with Ray Davies, he might have come up with something like this” -Independent on Sunday
***** “Brilliantly original - full of space and isolated detail” MOJO
***** “A remarkably gifted talent” The Guardian
show less
