Saturday 06/08/05 Mostly Autumn @ Richmond Live festival, Yorkshire

Tonight's headliners Mostly Autumn are due on stage some time after nine, but at 8pm enormous rain-clouds gather over Richmond, enveloping Swaledale in an eerie, almost Blakeian darkness. Just on cue after 9pm the heavens open. The fact their sizable audience is freezing cold and drenched to the bone by the time Bryan and co. take to the stage transpires to be of little importance: Mostly Autumn are magnificent.

 

Dedicating their set to those still lamenting the band’s cancelled performance at last week’s washed out Blakey Ridge festival, the band set about tonight’s show with a grace, elegance and style which arguably surpasses even their own high standards. It almost goes without saying, their powerful, atmospheric rock, laced as always with more than a smattering of good, healthy, folk shindiggery, goes down, well, a storm.

 

The set is radically different from the last time Gigwise caught up with Mostly Autumn two weeks ago at Dumfriesshire’s Wickerman festival, incorporating such early classics as ‘Winter Mountain’ mysteriously absent from their Wickerman set. But where was ‘Never The Rainbow’ dammit? A strange omission of one of the band’s most enduring anthems, but nay bother – exceptional performances of ‘Answer the Question’, ‘Caught in a Fold’, ‘The Darkness Before the Dawn’ and the hauntingly beautiful ‘Evergreen’ more than compensated.

 

The show reaches its peak with a brilliantly executed folk medley blending together ‘Out of the Inn’ and ‘Shindig’, performed with such energy and charisma that many in the (by now extremely damp) audience have a new favourite band. Ending with a particularly stunning rendition of ‘Heroes Never Die’, dedicated as always to Robbie Josh, Mostly Autumn once again leave the festival stage to rapturous applause, having earned themselves an army of new fans. Rock? They certainly do.