Tartine de Clous

Event information

Growing up in the department of Charente in Western France, Tartine de Clous have shared friendship & song since their youth. Storied songs are presented in an uplifting & moving communality which encourages close listening & trust that unfolds, as Alasdair Roberts notes, ‘with a patient confidence’.

Part of a lineage that includes some of the great French folk revival groups of the late 20th century, they sing predominantly a repertoire of unaccompanied three-part harmony arrangements of traditional songs. Their new album Compter les dents, recorded in the home of late musician & ethnomusicologist Claude Flagel, is a collection of songs from the Vendée department on France’s Western seaboard, ‘songs of love and war, life and death, played out on land and sea’ (Alasdair Roberts).

As Chiz Williams, writing on the recording of Au Cube, notes, the songs hold a deeply sensory & transportive power - ‘to taste the stews we ate, the stories we swapped, the technology we manipulated and the people we touched’. In the eloquent simplicity of Alasdair Roberts, the songs of Tartine de Clous are ‘songs passed down and sung by ordinary men and women, gracefully delivered with the poetic economy which unites the folk song of all peoples’. Stories told through a song that contains no ending.
Tonight’s show is part of a UK tour and will close with the collaborative end notes of a first musical meeting between Tartine, Toby & Aidan.

‘extraordinary intimacy, an atmosphere quite unlike that of a standard gig - it’s as though you’re being regaled with songs by a few high-spirited locals in a French tavern,’ David Mckenna, The Quietus.