Back with their fourth album, the Unthanks remain true to their Geordie folk roots, even if big sister Rachel has been forced to hang up her clogs
''I think," says Rachel Unthank, "that people, some people, are into things that feel a bit more handcrafted just now. People are knitting again because they like the idea of making their own clothes; they go to farmers' markets because they like to know where their food is from; and they want to know a bit where their music comes from as well." Rachel, the elder of the singing sisters who lead the Unthanks, is trying to explain the current revival of interest in English folk music. And pointedly, unlike some of the acoustic bands that are picking up prizes and hail vaguely from west London, there is no doubting where the Unthanks fell to earth.
There have been Unthanks in Northumberland since at least the 12th century, the moniker deriving from a dialect word for squatters or travellers who appropriated common land. The Unthanks were subsequently a "border reiver" family, outlaws who recognised no jurisdiction but their own. That singular lineage seems ingrained in the music of Rachel Unthank and her younger sister, Becky, who grew up west of Newcastle, not too far from the village that bears their surname. Their voices channel spirited life into centuries-old melodies and make ancient heartbreaks new. They wear this gift lightly, but you only have to listen to any of the opening lines of their fourth album, Last, to know exactly which otherworldly place they are coming from.
I met the sisters last week, with Adrian McNally, their manager, pianist, producer and arranger (and also Rachel's husband) at a cinema bar in Newcastle. In the foyer were posters announcing that their latest collaboration, which will involve them playing in front of a specially created documentary about the Tyne shipyards, is sold out.
They are just back from Australia where they have played a tour of festivals. Rachel's jetlag is given an extra edge by the fact that she is six months' pregnant; to compensate she is mainlining popcorn. It is compelling to watch the sisters together; even in conversation they seem in bright-eyed harmony, finishing each other's sentences, scrutinising each other's responses, always perfectly attuned.
Rachel is eight years older than Becky ('seven and a half' to be precise, she says quickly) and singing together has been a way of life. Their dad ? George ? is part of a folk group called the Keelers that specialised in robust sea shanties of the north-east, their mother is a stalwart of local choirs, and they were brought up at festivals and folk clubs. One thing that always set them apart was that they liked to dress up of an evening. Among the beards and shorts at festivals they would generally emerge from their tent in high heels and full make-up. "We've always loved 40s and 50s style," Becky says. "We'd always spend ages getting ready. And then go out into this muddy field. It's that sense of occasion I suppose." "And," Rachel adds, "we've always been quite curvy ladies, so you have to be a bit careful about what suits you."
Becky can't remember a time when she wasn't singing with her sister.Whenever there was a family party, everyone would come armed with a song. And there was always a family party. "When Becky was really young," Rachel says, "she would only sing if I sang with her. So it sort of grew from there. It has always been a part of our relationship. When I left home and went to university, we would sing together on the phone. It is a good way to explore your relationship. We find the harmonies really comfortable. It's just: you try that bit and I'll do this bit."
On their new album, like their previous ones, their voices take splendid turns; Rachel's is more direct, boisterous, Becky's more breathy and vulnerable; both are capable of proper honesty and beauty. They look for songs together, searching for stories and ballads that speak to them in archives like The Northumberland Minstrelsy, or in remembered snatches of something they have heard from their parents' record collection, or in folk clubs. They started out with 40 for the new album before getting it down to eight or nine, which were supplemented, at McNally's suggestion, by cover versions of a Tom Waits song ("No One Knows I'm Gone") and an unlikely, triumphant, King Crimson number ("Starless"), as well as an original composition by McNally, which forms the title track.
Rachel's husband has now added father-to-be to his lengthy Unthank job title. He somewhat reluctantly joined the band on stage after their two previous pianists ? Belinda O'Hooley and Stef Conner ? left. "Rachel and I got together romantically before there was a band," he says, with a grin, "and we were determined not to become involved professionally on the basis that we would probably always have enough to argue about without work."
It never quite turned out that way. To begin with, McNally says, his hardest job was persuading them that they should sing on stage. "They had this idea that everyone was a singer, that even the worst voice in the room could move you to tears, and the notion of getting up off the folk-room floor and on the stage was paralysing to them."
Having convinced them eventually that people might pay to listen to them, he fell into the role of manager, promoter and producer. "I think I've had about three weeks off in six years," he says. He has been vaguely amused that all their hard work has coincided with the arrival of "nu-folk" and "folk'n'roll" and Mumford & Sons winning a Brit.
"We have a pop world and an indie world that has noticed the vernacular of folk music again," McNally observes. "A lot of young men in their 20s have realised that a banjo and an acoustic guitar add some sense of authenticity to what they do. You go to any festival these days and there is barely a band that doesn't have the word 'Fire', 'Wolf' or 'Fox' in their title. It's decoration really, whether in the music or imagery. And good luck to them. We don't see ourselves as part of that though. Or part of anything really."
The artists McNally admires, and aspires to, he lists as Robert Wyatt, Antony and the Johnsons and Sufjan Stevens. "There is something they have in common," he says. "All three men are authors of their own arrangements essentially. Sufjan plays practically all the instruments on his records. There is no sense of band members competing. That's how we try approach it." Partly to compensate, he suggests, for what he describes as his own relatively limited piano playing, McNally has incorporated arrangements for a string quartet (recorded in their village hall) to several of the tracks on Last, "to fill in more colours", in addition to the guitar of his lifelong friend Chris Price and the fiddle playing of the honorary Unthank Niopha Keegan.
Both Rachel and Becky attest to McNally's sense of direction for the band, the way the arrangements bring their storytelling to life. "We try not to be precious about any of it," Rachel says. "Folk music is well archived anyway; all that work was done in the 60s. There is the freedom to experiment with it all now."
She is aware that not all the directions they are taking might be music to the ears of "folk purists", but she's not too bothered. "You might get the odd blogger saying we are not respecting this or that tradition properly. But I think blogging is really like overhearing someone slagging you off in a pub. It's not to be taken that seriously, so I don't read much of it. Some people might prefer the arrangements to be more 'clean' but there are plenty of people doing that as well if you like it that way."
One tradition that they are staying entirely faithful to is the music's capacity for graphic grimness. If their wonderful Mercury-prize nominated album The Bairns had a theme, it was infant mortality. Though the new CD dwells more on brutal rejection and betrayal than death, it is still a bit like eavesdropping on a fantastically harmonious victims' support group.
Both sisters are unrepentant. "We're miserable buggers underneath," Rachel says. "We are not afraid of it. As kids, those are the songs you love. The ones about death and heartbreak; like fairy stories, they are brutal. It is good to not be afraid of the sad side of life. 'Patience Kershaw' on the last album was about a woman working in the mines and she has lost her hair. I have little girls come up to me and say that's their favourite; I've had pictures sent to me of Patience Kershaw with an arrow to her baldy patch?"
Becky, who is excitedly engaged to be married, and lives in the idyllic Yorkshire village of Hebden Bridge, agrees. "I get a bit traumatised to be honest when someone suggests we do a happy song," she says, laughing. "We did 'Betsy Bell' on our last album [a sort of music hall knees-up] and that was about enough for me. I love singing 'Gallowgate Lad' on the current one. It's this girl crying and pouring her heart out to a stranger outside Central Station in Newcastle. I totally relate to that. Ask me a question after I have had a drink and I will tell you my life story."
A lot of the power of this melancholy is rooted in the language, which comes naturally to the Unthanks, the strong maternal Geordie of "hinny" and "canny" and "bonny bit" lads and lasses. Their ease with it helps them to avoid artifice and sentimentality, to sing plainly. "I remember I was singing a pop song once as a kid at home," Becky says. "And I sang the word 'love' in a sort of dodgy transatlantic way. And my dad stopped me and said, how do you say the word 'love'? He didn't say much to us, but he was clear on that."
If ever there was a band that was unlikely to forget where it came from, it is the Unthanks. They have lately been running a residential singing weekend on the coast at Seahouses, north of Sunderland. Forty lucky punters staying in upturned boats, with McNally frying breakfast and the sisters teaching four-part harmonies in pubs. "There is nothing that beats communal singing," Rachel says, with certainty.
Well, if there is, Becky suggests, at least in the eyes of some their audience, then it is clog dancing. As girls, they performed together in a dance group and they still do a good deal of "clogging" on stage. "It's funny," Becky suggests. "When I was a teenager, I didn't ever go around telling people I was a folk singer, let alone a clog dancer. Now I imagine it might be quite a cool thing to say."
The one concession they appear to be making to Rachel's pregnancy is to let her hang up her clogs on tour from now on. Becky is insisting that her sister sits on a chair while she goes through her paces on her own. "They are worried it's a bit jolting for the baby," Rachel says, with some slight dismay. Other than that, she doesn't imagine that the new addition will change their schedule too much. They were planning to take the summer off, but they now seem to have signed up to collaborate with the world champion Brighouse and Rastrick brass band on a concert in Durham Cathedral. "It seems too good an opportunity to miss," McNally insists. Keeping things very much in the family, they are touring in the autumn, and, it's hoped, bringing the sisters' mother along as a tour granny. "The sooner he or she learns to play something," Rachel suggests, smiling, of her unborn Unthank, "the easier it is all going to be."
The Unthanks's album Last is out on Rabble Rouser on 14 March. The band tour the UK from 19 March
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