LONDON: The Water Rats

Wednesday 21st February, 2018

7:30pm

Event information

It was only a matter of time. A late night bar conversation between Sam Carter and Jim Moray (both BBC Folk Award winners in their own right) concluded in the forming of a gleefully raucous guitar band that plays traditional songs and tunes, without committing the sins of the past.

False Lights are a folk rock group, formed in the spirit of the genre’s late-‘60s originators but informed by the music of Sam and Jim’s far more recent youth. It felt to them that no one had updated the template. False Lights owe as much to Radiohead as they do to Fairport Convention.

False Lights made their live debut headlining Suffolk’s Folk East festival in 2014. By then the band had expanded from a drunken notion into a line-up that boasts not only Carter and Moray on vocals and guitars but also Nick Cooke from the Kate Rusby band on melodeon, Tom Moore from Moore, Moss Rutter on violin, Jon Thorne from Lamb on bass, and Sam’s long serving drummer Sam Nadel. A dream list of musicians making a fantastic racket.

Fans of Sam and Jim’s often sombre solo work might be surprised by their stated intention to make False Lights a joyful spectacle. But that’s immediately evident when they perform. This is a turn-it-up-to-eleven-and-throw-yourself-about-your-dad’s-garage kind of group. Folk songs you can jump to.