Presented as part of the inaugural Assembly Folk and Food Festival, Northumbrian powerhouses, The Unthanks, take to the Spiegeltent stage with a sense of awe.  Sisters Rachel and Becky are joined on stage by pianist and composer Adrian McNally, violinist and third vocalist Niopha Keegan, and bassist and guitarist Chris Price.

It’s a treat to see the band in its full line up – a taut, joyful quintet that perform 15 songs over 90 minutes with a whole history of their careers thrown in for free (they’d driven up that morning having finished a singing retreat for 60 only that day and confessed to having a shandy or two the previous evening).  Nonetheless all five are in sparkling form and clearly having a ball.

The set spans the full range of the folk vocabulary from folklore, to folk history, to folk horror. The latter during two numbers; a segue from ‘Magpie’ into ‘The Scarecrow Knows’ (their 2019 commission for the Worzel Gummidge theme that must have given small children nightmares) and Rachel Unthank and The Winterset’s ‘I Wish, I Wish’.  In both, the haunting, almost frightening, use of the Indian Harmonium gives out shades of Lankum, but created long before the Irish hipsters had become popular.

Folklore is celebrated in a Scots song, ‘The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry’ that is illuminated with a beautiful ethereal underwater effect.  This lighting complements the crystal-clear sound throughout.

Their Northeastern roots are celebrated in style in fans’ favourite ‘Here’s The Tender Coming’ and shipping songs like ‘Great Northern River’ and Elvis Costello’s classic, ‘Shipbuilding’, that’s rendered beautifully in unusual unison from the three singers – harmony being their stock in trade. ‘The Testimony of Patient Kershaw’ is a hopelessly forlorn story of a shame-stricken 17-year-old female pit-worker who can never hope to be a lady owing to her muscular legs and balding head from a life of toil underground.

But the real tearjerker is ‘King of Rome’.  It’s an almost religious experience to hear this heartrending tale of working-class joy told to a rapt sell out audience on a drizzly Sunday night.

It’s a dazzling display of musicianship, gorgeous harmonious singing, storytelling and, to top it all, the set approaches its ends with a spot of folk-dancing as the sisters don clogs and gie it laldy to ‘Lucky Gilchrist’.