A big anniversary week for The Unthanks
Folk gets an orchestral boost
“We didn’t want to make too much of it,” says Adrian McNally, reflecting on 20 years of The Unthanks.
“It’s not that big a deal but rather than go on a big 20th anniversary tour, we thought let’s do a handful of gigs with an orchestra.”
Understatement must come easily in South Yorkshire (Adrian grew up in a pit village near Barnsley).
The first of these ‘gigs’ with Royal Northern Sinfonia is on Wednesday (January 28) in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall. Then come Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Thursday, The Glasshouse, Gateshead, on Friday and London’s Barbican Centre on Saturday.
Tickets have been flying and you might be lucky to get one. This is a group with a devoted and eclectic fanbase and, in any case, who wouldn’t want to hear its songs given orchestral oomph?
As an artistic partner of The Glasshouse, it had been noted by The Unthanks that their 20th anniversaries coincided – in 2024, actually, but better late than never.
So now, says Adrian with a slightly dodgy phone connection and understatement having been parked, “we’re preparing for the four most important gigs of our lives”.
Nerves, he admits, will be tingling before they go on stage in Manchester.
“Just for comparison, we took part in the dramatisation of a book called Elmet (premiered in Bradford for its UK City of Culture year) and by the time we did the show for the first time we’d been together with the cast, crew and director for seven weeks.
“With an orchestra you get one three-hour rehearsal.
“So the day before the first performance we’ll be in the King’s Hall (Newcastle University) with the orchestra and that’ll be the first time these scores will have been played.
“We’ll rock up at Bridgewater Hall and get a bit more of a rehearsal on the afternoon of the first show and that’s it.
“You just have to hope you’ll get through each piece once. I’ve been on a stage with an orchestra in the past where we haven’t even got through every piece before it’s performed live.”
You sense everything will be fine. The orchestra is famously adaptable and The Unthanks’ long record of awards and acclaim speaks for itself.
But for Adrian, who likens himself to the group’s boss and dogsbody rolled into one, there’s a lot to consider.
The financial risk, he wants to stress, lies entirely with The Unthanks, with the orchestra essentially a hired band.
“The cost of touring with an orchestra is so expensive that we’ve decided to axe the woodwind in a fairly sweeping way to reduce the numbers. We’ve kept the flutes but that’s it.”
This necessitated some intricate tinkering with the score, which Adrian was busying himself with over the festive period.
The extraordinary thing – well, extraordinary to me – is that Adrian, although patently gifted, doesn’t read or write music, having had no formal musical education.
How does he do it?
Describing himself as a “two-bit musician” who didn’t do his piano practice as a kid, he says any ability he does have comes from the huge amount of music he was exposed to when growing up.
“When ideas come, they come fully formed in my mind through all that musical vocabulary I’ve acquired as a listener. Then it’s just a question of getting it out.
“I guess the first string quartet score I wrote for the band was Felton Lonnin for (second album) The Bairns.
“The record was very fraught to make and the quartet score was created overnight with me sending parts in audio form to Niopha (Keegan), our violinist, who does read and write music.
“In the morning we were still dotting i’s and crossing t’s but it’s still possibly the best string quartet score I’ve ever written.
“Up to that point, and including The Bairns, I wasn’t even an on-stage member of the band. I was offstage for the first four or five years, unconvinced of my own ability, and wrote and arranged from the sidelines.”
Having first got involved with Rachel Unthank romantically, when her younger sister Becky was still at university, he then steered the group through its first two albums – when it was still called Rachel Unthank and the Winterset – before joining the line-up on keyboards for album number three, Here’s the Tender Coming.
Chris Price also joined at that time, Chris and Adrian having grown up just three doors apart in that South Yorkshire pit village.
“What my dad didn’t have in his record collection,” Adrian recalls, “his dad did.”
Adrian and Rachel got married and had two children, and although the marriage didn’t last their allegiance through music remains strong. And here they all are, Niopha having been snapped up to complete the current line-up on graduating from Newcastle University’s folk music degree course.
Heavily featured in the concert programme, says Adrian, will be Mount the Air, the acclaimed eighth album which came out 10 years ago… “but that aside it’ll be our best attempt at a cross-section of all our records to date.
“We’ll pull in pieces from across the repertoire, including some based on orchestral arrangements we’ve done before, for the BBC Proms with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and with Charles Hazlewood’s Army of Generals (a period instrument orchestra).”
The Unthanks are no strangers to big stages and packed theatres but Adrian insists the places they would naturally head for as audience members would be “a room above a pub watching some old boys and girls singing unaccompanied.
“That’s how we like it best.”
But over two decades they’ve taken folk music to another level, drawing on a wide range of influences and gathering fans from across the musical spectrum and around the world.
Still they favour a DIY approach, running popular residential singing courses which help to fund their activities and where Adrian burnishes his Jack-of-all-trades reputation as chief cook.
When scoring for an orchestra, he still sometimes works in the same old painstaking fashion, with Niopha alongside him, although he says software’s increasingly coming into play.
“I’ll play the music on my keyboard and the software will spew out a crude score which an orchestrator can tart up so it’s fit for purpose.
“But every time I finish doing something like this, I think I must get to a point where I can do it all myself.
“I’m under no illusion. I’d be a lot better off if I was properly trained, but all the jobs I used to do for the band before I became an on-stage member I pretty much still do.
“The idea of acquiring another skill like learning to read and write music is… well, in one sense it seems like the exact thing I should be doing.
“Maybe I just need to delegate more.”
Assuming he hasn’t been put out of action by a disgruntled woodwind player, Adrian and the rest of The Unthanks will be milking a great deal of applause in the coming days.
Details of all the anniversary gigs and the next (non-orchestral) tour which begins in May can be found on The Unthanks website.