The Gift Band Live On Tour - The Union Chapel November 2010 [DVD] [NTSC] [2012]

What a great gig. Norma and Eliza share singing duties, with Eliza also playing fiddle, and it's a warm and wonderful affair.

It's a good-length show, there's a lot of songs and, crucially, a lot of chat between the songs as well, as Norma and Eliza introduce the songs to the audience, explain where they're from and why they mean something. There's a mixture of traditional songs and more modern ones, with Richard Thompson being the most-used modern writer, though Clive Gregson gets a look-in as well with "Fred Astaire". The band are good - clearly very talented, and with enough sense to not get in the way. Martin Carthy (Norma's husband, Eliza's dad) plays gently in the background, it's emphatically not his show, he's just there to help his girls.

If you don't know anything about the Watersons and think it's all going to be terribly po-faced, just give it a go. If you need convincing, look up an online bio of Norma - this is a woman who did CND and Amnesty gigs before they were fashionable, and threw it all in for a while to be a DJ in the West Indies in the 70s. It may be Traditional, but it's fun and actually remarkably moving.

Would have been a 5 star review, but docked one star for slightly iffy sound on the first couple of songs - which presumably reflects the live mix - and also because the video jumps. On my BD player, at least, it looks like there's been some sort of frame-rate conversion problem and it's dropping a frame every second or so. It's not actually very distracting, and certainly doesn't ruin the experience or anything like that, but you can just see it when there's close-up shots of moving things, generally faces. To authentically create the ambience of a gig, the sound could probably have done with a little more of the audience buzz mixed into it, some of the jokes seem to fall flat because you can't hear the audience reaction. But none of that really matters compared to the music, which is great.