"Music as tough as it is gentle, as ancient as it is modern, and as coldly desolate as it is achingly intimate. They might not end up being the best-selling British all-girl group of all time, but they're well on their way to being the most charismatic and imaginative" Paul Morley, Observer Music Magazine Top 50 Albums of the Year (number 17)
"Every now and again, and I mean, every now and again, once in a blue moon type of every now and again, you hear music that is so complete, so wonderful, unique and yet familiar that it stops you in your tracks. They have that blue moon magic about them, and they have it in spades." BBC Website Live Review
Forging links between folk worlds old, new and other, Rachel and her set have blown a bracing north-easterly gale through traditional English song, casting it in an endlessly inventive and playful new mould.
Transcendent and grounded music folds around unsentimental old, new and imaginatively borrowed stories of booze, brawls, abuse, loss, fear, infantile death, depravity and sorrow. "If the effect is austere, it is never bleak. Rather the starkness is graceful, gripping and utterly thrilling" says Nigel Williamson in HMV Magazine.
Described as "a bewitching, dream-like, down-to-earth masterpiece" in the Observer Music Magazine's Top 50 Albums of the 2007, The Bairns is already "a classic in it’s own lifetime" (Channel 4), featuring as either the top or only folk album in every 2007 end-of-year poll it featured in.
Subverting folk music with love and authority, Rachel Unthank and the Winterset are perhaps unprecedented in their ability to ability to communicate traditional music to unforgiving mainstream audiences: “a sensationally graceful sound that can be epic and subdued, dreamy and specific, as well as supernaturally ancient and defiantly modern.. easily more contemporary and stylish than boys in skinny trousers holding electric guitars like it’s 1969.” Paul Morley
Dancing down the leftfield and singing in their own lilting Geordie accents, Rachel Unthank & The Winterset are described by Ian MacMillan as the "inheritors, curators and gleeful distorters" of Tyneside's traditions.
Discreetly provocative arrangements draw on elements of blues, jazz, music hall, burlesque cabaret, classical and leftfield contemporary music, making their take on folk music peerless, fearless and wholeheartedly brave.
Fans as disparate as Robert Wyatt, Kate Rusby, Paul Morley, Tracey Thorn, Nic Jones, Phil Jupitus and Joan As Policewoman have joined the chorus of adulation from the press.
Debut album Cruel Sister won Mojo Folk Album of the Year, and new album The Bairns has been described as "utterly gorgeous" by The Guardian as "a work of towering quality" by The Telegraph.
Rachel Unthank & The Winterset were nominated for Best Group, Best Live Act, Best Album and The Horizon Award at 2008 BBC Folk Awards, winning the Horizon Award.
This biography was provided by the artist or their representative.
