It was almost exactly ten years ago when I last saw June Tabor and Oysterband at the De La Warr Pavilion, my first time visiting this stunning piece of 1930s architecture. I wasn’t even living down here yet but a friend had a spare ticket going and I came down for the weekend. So, when Oysterband announced their ‘Long Long Goodbye’ farewell tour with June Tabor, once again, as their very special guest I booked a ticket straight away.
For a band that’s been going almost five decades, it would be unthinkable for them not to include June Tabor as they begin playing their final gigs. From the moment they made their first album together it was a match made in heaven. When Freedom and Rain came out in 1990 Oysterband’s rebooting of the folk-rock genre for the ‘80s and ‘90s combined with Tabor’s darkly elegant vocals to create an unforgettable slice of pseudo-gothic cool. Two more hugely popular collaboration albums have followed.
With two hour-long sets and a short interval, I wasn’t completely clear how they were going to approach things and hadn’t read any other reviews. Would they play the first set as Oysterband and the second with June Tabor? Or would they mix and match? To warm applause Oysterband sans Tabor took to the stage for the first song, then Tabor joined them to launch into their unforgettable cover of Velvet Underground’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, a shared love of Velvet Underground as well as traditional songs being something that helped cement the foundations for the two joining forces, recalled Tabor.
The remainder of the evening proceeds in that same vein with a superb mix of songs that Tabor and Oysterband had collaborated on for their previous albums (including an utterly spellbinding ‘Bonny Bunch of Roses’ and their unique interpretation of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart which is just perfection) alongside regular Oysterband classics, like ‘A River Runs’ and ‘Dancing As Fast As I Can’. For a couple of songs the rest of the band vacate the stage and Tabor sings alone with acoustic accompaniment from Oysterband guitarist, Alan Prosser, including a cover of Les Barker’s humorous rewrite of Roseville Fair, as her warmly-felt tribute to the comic poet who died last year.
At one point Tabor tells us how much she loves what she calls ‘cinematic songs’, songs where the lyrics are so vivid in painting a picture and telling a story. There are few singers, however, who make an audience hang on to every word in the way that Tabor does. I’m so glad I got to see this most perfect of musical collaborations one final time. And an encore of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ and an emotional crowd sing-along of Oysterband’s ‘Put Out The Lights’ made the evening even more special. An unforgettable evening – catch them while you can!
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