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Maz O'Connor

Venue: The Corduroy Folk Club at The Atkinson
Town: Southport
Date: 29/5/14
Website: http://www.mazoconnor.com

The Corduroy Folk Club at The Atkinson, Southport may not convene very often but what it lacks in frequency, it certainly makes up in quality. In the past six months I have attended excellent concerts by Lisa Knapp and The Furrow Collective. To these illustrious ranks I can now add Maz O'Connor, one of Britain's finest young folk artists.

Maz is touring to promote her superb second album "This Willowed Light",which has been on repeat play on my i-pod since I received an advance copy.

Produced by Jim Moray, "This Willowed Light" is reviewed elsewhere in this magazine but in my view it is undoubtedly one of the albums of the year. Before her gig, I had the pleasure of interviewing Maz for Fatea and the results can be found in these pages.

And so to the gig itself. Maz performed solo, accompanying herself on a variety of guitars and shruti box. What strikes you about hearing Maz's voice, whether recorded or in person, is its clarity and purity, a bit like Joni Mitchell with a hint of a Northern accent.

Interestingly, even though her new album is only recently available [at live shows], Maz performed several new songs which she has written since recording it, starting with "Winter's Blues" and followed by another new one, "Mother Make My Bed", a tale of youthful excess-"When you're young you're poor and the only thing you want is more".

Maz then visited "This Willowed Light" for her superb composition "Derby Day" which tells the sad story of suffragette Emily Wilding-Davison who was trampled and killed by the King's horse at the 1913 Derby. Maz was commissioned to write this song by Broadstairs Folk Festival and it is a brilliant depiction of the tragic events, seen through the eyes of a young boy in the crowd. Maz performed the song with such intensity that you almost felt as if you were there as well.

Another new song followed, continuing the historical theme. Maz wrote "Greenwood Side" after visits to the National Portrait Gallery. The subject of the song is Elizabeth "Lizzie" Siddal who was a model and muse for several Pre-Raphaelite artists, notably Millais [she posed for his famous painting "Ophelia"]. Lizzie eventually married Rossetti but died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862. Her story has a rather morbid ending. When she died, Rossetti slipped a volume of his poetry into her coffin. Unfortunately, it was the only copy he had made and he subsequently had to seek permission to exhume his late wife's body to recover his poetry. Suffice it to say that he got his poetry back!

Maz is not only a superb songwriter, she is also a fine interpreter of traditional material, as shown by her beautiful rendition of the ghostly Child Ballad "Sweet William and Lady Margaret" in which the deceased Margaret visits her former lover on his wedding day.

In my interview with Maz she disclosed that one of her major influences is early Bob Dylan and this influence shows in her composition "The Singing Of The Ocean" [from "Willowed Light"], which, to me, sounds like a riposte to Bob's "Boots Of Spanish Leather", a suggestion which Maz thought was "cool".

Maz recently spent a year with the EFDSS at Cecil Sharp House on a BBC Performing Arts Fellowship and this coincided with the digitising of the Full English Archive, from which she selected "Awake Awake" as the opening song on the new album and which she performed tonight, accompanying herself on shruti box as she told this haunting tale of betrayed love.

As a songwriter, Maz tackles some unusual subject matter, none more so than in "Mississippi Woman" where she has re-written the creation story, so that man is created from woman, rather than the other way round. An interesting song, which despite its unorthodox content, was well received by the audience.

The somewhat supernatural theme continued with the mysterious Child Ballad "The Grey Selkie" which tells of a half-man, half-seal who fathers a child by a woman and who predicts his death and that of his son. Maz's performance perfectly captured the dark, brooding atmosphere of this eerie song.

From Celtic mythology, Maz took us to Ancient Greece for the tale of Persephone [daughter of Zeus and Demeter] who is abducted to the Underworld by Hades. No one can accuse Maz of not having a broad range of subject matter in her songs!

One of my favourite songs on "This Willowed Light" is the gorgeous "Bird Song", another product of Maz's year at Cecil Sharp House. The song was collected by Sharp in the Appalachians and Maz's version has a lovely new tune by Jack Harris.

After a superb performance, Maz took a much deserved encore for which she sang a stirring version of Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe".

It is abundantly clear from tonight's performance that Maz O'Connor is a prodigious talent. Not only is she a fantastic singer and interpreter of traditional material but she is also a hugely imaginative and original songwriter. In short, she has it all.

Peter Cowley