INTERVIEW:Nee naw, nee naw! Sisters and husbands touring together? The Unthanks, one of Britain's sterling folk acts, manage just fine, they tell SINEAD GLEESON
APART FROM THE obvious, there are lots of subjects I want to broach with The Unthanks. Clog-dancing. Husbands-and-wives-in-bands. As they hail from one of the most football-saturated corners of England, I figure it’s worth finding out if they’re fans of the beautiful game. Barnsley, Sunderland, Middlesbrough and Newcastle all do battle near Ryton, where they are from, so I ask singer Rachel if she supports Middlesbrough. The question is casual, but the response is almost indignant. “Nooo! My brother and I support Newcastle, but my dad is from Middlesbrough, so the rest of my entire family support them.” And no one supports Roy Keane’s ex-team Sunderland? “No, the only thing our family is united about in footballing terms is our hatred of Sunderland.”
This turns out to be the first of many surprise declarations from one of Britain’s finest contemporary folk acts. And that’s part of the problem, admits Rachel Unthank (yes, it’s her real surname), who is well aware of the odd ideas people have about the band she’s in with her husband Adrian, her sister Becky, Niopha Keegan and Chris Price. “People have preconceptions about our music. They come to our gigs and tell us ‘I don’t like folk music, but I like you lot’, so we have to tell them that they do like folk music – it just isn’t what they thought it was. There’s a really outdated concept of folk as men with beer bellies swigging tankards of ale.”
Pre-judging the image of folk is one thing, but it’s the pigeon-holing of the music that irks her husband and fellow band member, Adrian McNally. “There’s a new wave of pseudo-folk music that’s not really folk in terms of its content. The imagery around it is very pastoral, but the folksongs we grew up with were about mining and dying at sea.”
The area they hail from has a strong folk tradition and the folk songs that interest them have always been about people’s lives. “We’re really lucky in that the northeast of England has such a strong character, and that’s reflected in the songs. There are lots of links to the sea, the mining industry and the countryside,” says Rachel. When I first call her, she excuses herself amid frantic whispering. “Sorry, I’m in my granny’s house and had to tell her I was doing an interview.” Singing has been in their family for generations, but Granny Unthank isn’t a part of it. “Oh no,” she says in a charming, bay-wide northern accent, “she’s not a singer. I think she finds it a little bit emotionally raw.” Too true, when their repertoire comprises songs about domestic violence and fishermen drowning at sea, sung in lilting harmonies.
Becky and Rachel’s parents are both musical – their father sings with folk group The Keelers, while their mother sings with a women’s folk choir. The girls originally started singing together as a way of getting into folk festivals for free. As well as singing, they are also accomplished clog dancers. “Becky and I had an outfit called Clever Clogs, so it started from there.”
As a genre, one of the central tenets of folk is narrative. These are songs about characters, tragedies and history and this storytelling aspect has always appealed to the band. “It’s what drew us in as kids,” says Rachel. “There would be ‘sing-a-rounds’ at our house, and I would sit under the kitchen table and feel like I was being allowed into a magical, adult world of stories. When Becky and I are looking for songs to sing, it’s always the stories that grab us first.”
Unlike most contemporary music, folk is not necessarily about creating your own material. As well as traditional airs and laments, the group have tackled songs by Robert Wyatt and Will Oldham and are comfortable re-interpreting the work of other people. “The folksinger Dick Goughan once said that every song needs 1,000 singers.”
Band dynamics are often the stuff of legend, even when blood and marriage aren’t factored in. Becky is eight years younger than Rachel, and Rachel believes that touring in a band with her sister is a source of comfort. “When I was away at university, we used to sing down the phone to each other. Sounds sickening doesn’t it? But we love singing together. There’s something very intuitive about singing with a family member.” Adrian, she admits, is something of a big brother to Becky, but that husband and wife have to remember to do “coupley” things when they’re on tour.
Paul-and-Linda-McCartney jokes aside, what does Adrian think about being in a band with his wife? “It’s clearly a bad idea,” he laughs. “It was weird in the early days, because Rachel had a real fear, even though she’d been singing since childhood. I had to drag her kicking and screaming through the first album, until she could see how good she was at communicating stories, and how talented she was. Until then, it was horrendous. Since the new album, things have never been better.”
The Unthanks play the Róisín Dubh, Galway tonight and Whelan’s, Dublin tomorrow.
