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Kan

Venue: The Met
Town: Bury
Date: 24/5/14
Website: http://www.kan-music.co.uk

The final night of The Met's 'Big Whistle' weekend saw multi-talented and multi-national quartet Kan closing the event. A weekend of concerts and workshops, beginning with a gig by the legendary Fairport Convention always means it's a great bill and a must attend event in the North West folk calendar, particularly for the lucky local residents for whom the quality of shows out on at The Met must certainly be wallet draining. It's becoming a real Mecca for musicians in the folk, roots and acoustic fields.

Internet sensations Kan - check out their brilliant 'Night Ride' set on YouTube and the reaffirmingly positive yet humorous comments by which fiddler Aidan O'Rourke is suitably taken- had a virtually full theatre packed with whistle fans to entertain with material from their debut album 'Sleeper' plus a whole load of other tunes from the respective catalogues of the prolific band members. There's such a vast range in the material they perform. It includes the slow graceful airs inspired by Aidan O'Rourke's native Scottish islands and whistler Brian Finnegan's tribute to his Grandma with 'Last Of The Starrs' and then there are what guitarist Ian Stephenson refers to as "our most romantic tune" when he introduced the album's opening track 'One Two Three' - if only life were as simple as 1-2-3 being the motivation, before some additional guitar chords were added to make things more 'life-like' and complicated. Aidan O'Rourke's 'stranded in a car on a New Zealand beach' (a true story of his trials on holiday at Ninety Mile Beach) was also a calming and atmospheric moment, but it's when the four of them kick into a thrilling groove of irrepressibly foot tapping tuneage that it's simply hard, nay impossible to keep still.

Nothing typifies it more than 'Marcos', last seen in the locale as yellow spotlights swung through the falling rain at the 2012 Ramsbottom Festival. Halfway through the tune, everything comes to a halt while Ian Stephenson sets up a frantic guitar rhythm and the four come together in a maelstrom of flute and whistle driven ecstasy - Aidan O'Rourke jerking to and fro and all underpinned by Jim Goodwin's rattling drum patterns. The way they combine and segue one tune into another to create lengthy instrumentals which move from mood to mood and seem to pass through an assortment of time signatures is a testament to their chemistry. As they go to pains to explain in the between tune patter, their inspirations are as varied as they come; both culturally diverse and at times unassumingly simple.

While their performance at the Festival De Ortigueira was also immortalised on YouTube, showing a band responding to an as wild an audience as it might be possible to get at a folk gig, all singin, all dancing and flag waving - even at times resembling a folk mosh pit - it was a much more reserved yet nonetheless discerning audience, who were treated to what, amongst all the projects with which these four musicians are involved, Kan must be the one which many fans consider the best of all.

Words & Pictures Mike Ainscoe