With a stage stripped to just an acoustic guitar, microphone and an electric box of tricks the award-winning and critically-acclaimed musician Kitty MacFarlane kept an attentive audience entertained at the Lichfield Guildhall.
With a set that took in the whole of her album Namer of Cloud and songs from her debut EP Time and Tide, and recently having been nominated for the Horizon Award in the 2019 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, this was a concert that relied heavily on word-play, storytelling and the purity and range of the performer’s sublime vocals.
The songs looked at the natural world in MacFarlane’s native Somerset, while ambient water and bird songs added to the sonic mix of the numbers, as well as looking at subjects that ranged from feminism to cloth and textile weaving.
Although stripped of their delicate aural colours on the album, songs such as Starling Song, Seventeen, Morgan’s Pantry, and the chilling Frozen Charlotte game to real life with just the gentlest of accompaniment, relying as they did on the power and beauty of Kitty MacFarlane’s vocal prowess.
Her musical career so far has seen her working with other musicians of the calibre of Blair Dunlop, Ben Walker, Ashley Hutchings, Ciaran Algar, and Sam Kelly, but this show proved without a doubt that she has a serious career at the centre of the stage as well as at the side of it.