The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman
Inchyra Arts Club, Perth, April 11
When it comes to making music, Sean Lakeman has kept it firmly in the family.
The eldest of three boys, Sean formed The Lakeman Brothers alongside Seth and Sam with the trio later being submerged into Equation, a folk quintet completed by Kathryn Roberts and Kate Rusby.
Roberts and Lakeman are now very much a duo, both in wedded life and in musical terms, having released four albums together since 2001.
With music running through their veins, it’s no surprise that the pair’s nineyear-old twin daughters are getting in on the act, having directed the video for murder ballad Child Owlet, an appropriately gory short film which wouldn’t have been possible without several bottles of ketchup.
“The girls are both terrific singers and they’re tinkering on pianos and drums,” says Lakeman. “I suppose making music is nothing special in their sphere, it’s around them all the time so it’s just what you do. If you grow up in a footballer’s family, then your world would be football. So music is just there, there’s no special time made for it.”
Now on the northern leg of their current tour, Roberts and Lakeman are using these live dates to punt a new EP, Saved For A Rainy Day.
Lakeman notes the title reflects the context in which the record was made: “We’ve had so many requests over the last couple of years for songs that we play live and which we hadn’t put onto a record: sometimes things don’t quite fit together on an album.
“We had these things knocking around and thought there was enough there to make a body of work so we combined those songs with a couple of our favourite cover versions: there’s a Warren Zevon song there and a Springsteen song that we love to play. It’s a collection of rarities and requests.”
Twice voted best duo at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards (most recently in 2016), Roberts and Lakeman’s ethereal and atmospheric brand of country-folkblues (Lakeman accurately describes them as “eclectic”) has made room for a more politically-charged song or two in recent times.
“The title track of our last album, Tomorrow Will Follow Today, is a socially aware protest song and there’s another one, Down, Dog!, which had a go at bigotry and arrogant politicians,” he says.
“As folk musicians, perhaps more so than pop artists, our genre has a social responsibility to document the times and comment on then.
Certainly it’s true as you get a bit older; a younger musician might think, ‘goodness, I may bury myself here if I say something too outrageous’, and they’d worry about not getting any gigs again. We’re not quite like that.”