Go Dig My Grave seeps in like a fog at ground level, low and creeping. The air inside Hackney Empire, moments ago filled with the shuffle of feet and rustling coats, seems to congeal. A harmonium’s drone presses against the ribs. Then, Radie Peat’s voice—something scraped from the walls of a centuries-old well, damp with sorrow, thick with something unnameable—cuts through. A hush takes hold. Not reverence, not exactly. More like a collective held breath, as if sound itself might fracture the moment.
This is how Lankum unspools itself. They do not play songs; they summon them, drag them through time and space until they are here, now, gnawing at the edges of perception. It is a slow-burning alchemy, a ritual of tension and release. Each track stretches into something liminal, drone layered upon drone, as if the music has decided it will not let go of you until it is done.
A fiddle line lingers just a second too long, unsettling in its patience. The uilleann pipes seep into the gaps, ancient and keening, as if the walls themselves might hum in sympathy.
By the time they reach Master Crowley’s, there is no delineation between the audience and the music. The tune itself does not begin so much as rise up from the ground. The interplay of fiddle and harmonium locks into something feverish—Daragh Lynch’s guitar a frenetic undercurrent, hands working like a craftsman shaping something out of raw, unyielding wood. You could swear the ceiling has dropped closer. It is not loud. It is immense.
Between songs, there are murmurs of tuning, a sip of water, the flickering shift from one instrument to another. But there is no small talk. No need to remind anyone that this is happening in real time. The atmosphere is something between séance and stormwatching. The space holds silence like it was built for it.
And then, The New York Trader. A shanty twisted into something harrowing, stretched taut with the weight of its own tale. The concertina wheezes, a death rattle before the inevitable plunge. The ship is cursed; the audience knows it. The mutiny is doomed before it even begins. Radie Peat does not just sing these stories—she exhumes them, breathes them out as if speaking them aloud might shift their endings.
The Turn does something different. It is less song, more invocation. The sound expands outward, reaching the rafters, reaching further. The quiet parts are not respite—they are suspense. The build is slow, inexorable, and then it is not slow at all. The noise unfurls into something that is almost too much. The bow across strings like a serrated edge. It presses against the body, an ache, a thrill. The sharp end of catharsis. There is a moment—there must be a moment—where the audience realizes it is inside the music, that they are as much a part of this thing as the hands that created it.
And just when it should be over, when the weight of it should dissipate—The Wild Rover. Not the one from the pub, not the one people think they know. This one is raw-boned and weary, stripped of bravado. The familiar melody dragged back through the centuries, presented bare, regretful. If there is a singalong, it is subdued, not triumphant. No nay never no more.
Bear Creek closes the night, a last, breathless sprint. A tune that feels older than the Empire itself, stretched across time. Fiddle lines run wild. It does not build, it does not swell—it simply exists at full force, until it doesn’t. Until the strings are stilled, the drone ebbs, the final note is allowed to hang, waiting to be swallowed by silence. And then, after what feels like minutes but is likely seconds, that silence is broken.
Applause, yes, but also something else. The sensation of having been somewhere—inside something vast, something unshakable. The awareness that even after stepping outside, even after the city noise rushes back in, the music will still be there, under the skin, humming in the bones.
And then the doors open, and the night takes everyone back.
Words & photos – Richard Isaac
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