Seeing Goblin Band play gay folk music in Corpus Christi dining hall last month (a much unexpected and very much free gig) was most welcome. After picking up on folk singer Natalie Wildgoose’s support rather than upon LYR’s top billing, I quickly realised that Simon Armitage was in fact the latter band’s frontman. So perhaps it was even more weirdly welcome to see the UK’s poet laureate sing in the ghost town of Eddington on a random Tuesday evening.

Holding a moment for my hay fever-suffering eyes – and a moment for my friend Meg’s equally fevered recall of the book ‘Station 11’ (she’s convinced its set in Eddington, rather than a post-apocalyptic US) – with a mid-dissertation writing mirage of a zombie hoard spilling across the grey pavement, we trotted over to the wonderful cuboid of Storey’s Field.

“An ode and an extension of all the great mournful women of folk”

Natalie Wildgoose has a voice like a theremin. It soars and wavers, evocative of Vashti Bunyan, Joan Baez, Clara Mann, Cinder Well… basically an ode and an extension of all the great mournful women of folk, I could go on and on. In confession, seeing Wildgoose live was my excuse for this review, alongside cultivating an increasing enthusiasm for the record label Broadside Hacks and their adjacent acts. She played stripped back set, with only her and a piano in the centre of the stage, already cluttered with the instruments and soundboards of LYR.

Wildgoose recorded her new EP Rural Hours in an isolated bothy in North Yorkshire with friends back in November without electricity or running water. Her approach to folk centres a lonely but calm sense of optimism, and (held as a theme for the evening) an apt nod to classic storytelling.

My favourite of hers is an older track, ‘I lingered’. The ballad about taking everything slower, while easily plasterable onto a semi-philosophic comfort-comment about sun and exam-ridden maze of Easter term, has a distinctly Christmas feel to it. Wildgoose ruminates upon driving down cold Yorkshire roads, to visit a village hall piano, leaving only when her hands got too cold to play anymore. Her songwriting embodies the peace of winter for me, “my feet were confused between worsted socks and wellington boots”, hailing my own frosty reflection upon a year passed, followed by a swift decision to buy an EP on the way out of the venue.w

“Slugging red wine, tapping his fingernails on a drum, and standing awkwardly: there he was, our poet laureate”

L-Y-R… stands for Land Yacht Regatta: sounds posh to me. Posh buzzword x3. Simon Armitage obviously intending nothing of the sort, probably in irony and intending upon my very reaction. Slugging red wine, tapping his fingernails on a drum, and standing awkwardly: there he was, our poet laureate. The band in front of us were dressed in a series of matching chaw jackets, bathed in golden light. My own consumption of Armitage’s work had been sadly (and rather shamefully) less poetry based and more driven by Gawain and the Green Knight reading and his theories on Bob Dylan’s strange rhyming patterns. But the presentation of his own music is a far cry from his clumped pages of criticism. As a simple, mellow blend of poetry and post rock jazz, and some of the best yellow and black visuals I’ve seen in a while… the experience was one of tuneful stories punctuated by declarations and terminations of “blah! blah! blah!” (and “HAH!”).

‘Guernica Jigsaw’ was beautifully uncomplicated comment for the over-commercialised world of art, and the exit through the gift shop mentality that we all frankly fall for. In this moment, all I could hear was John Cooper Clarke, lamenting and meditating on mundanity. Armitage’s pleads of “Who will buy my Guernica jigsaw / Who will buy my Mondrian stress ball? / Basquiat Skateboard?” were most appreciated by the art historian who was sat next to me.

As per (and by the slightly out of term standard), Meg and I were certainly the youngest in the room. I couldn’t help thinking LYR were something new that I’d missed hearing on radio in the mornings at home, championed as ‘LIAR’ by some Radio 6 DJ to the similarly chaw-jacketed sat with us in the room.