Smoke Fairies brought their haunting mixture of harmonic folk and Delta blues to York for the second time, but won’t be winning the Perrier.
Their last gig gave them an opportunity to visit the Jorvik Centre. “You hit your head didn’t you, Kaf?”, Jessica Davies asks fellow Fairy Katherine Blamire. “Yes”, she replies. Silence.
It’s not exactly Peter Kay, but Blamire soon opens up. “I have a phobia about mannequins and buttons, oh and bananas... and I don’t like beach towels that have been in the sand too long.”
We hear their viola player has not mentally recovered from fainting in a former plague-ridden part of Edinburgh this week and are told about a two-headed cat in a museum in home town Chichester, although Blamire confesses “technically it was in the Isle of Wight.” Bananas indeed. In between, these two sirens lure a sparse crowd into the sea with a gorgeous, edgy set which swings between English folk and the blues of the deep south (USA, not Brighton).
Opening with the eerie Devil In My Mind, they bring debut album Through Low Light And Trees to life with their vintage Hofners and a restrained backing band.
Strange Moon Rising is followed by Summer Fades and Storm Song which rises and falls into silence, but Blamire’s bottleneck brings a splash of Mississippi to the night on swampier numbers like Morning Blues.
Sunshine blew a gale through the occasionally winsome fairy dust and the girls finished with a punchy cover of Killing Joke’s Requiem, proving these heavenly creatures have a bit of post-punk devil inside.
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