[Rejjed by Cherwell and Isis]]...

Stornoway at the Sheldonian, 31st Oct

In one of those feeble bits of filler copy that consitute G2, I recall once reading some loser whose proudest vaunt was that he had known Joy Division when they were Warsaw, back in a Salford establishment called Eric’s. If all else fails, I fully expect to eke my moments through by reiterating, similarly, that I knew the most lyrical, melodic body of musicians in Britain back when they were just Stornoway, performing to a humble diehard audience of 600 or so Oxford students and residents in the Sheldonian Theatre, with only an orchestra apiece to back them up.

The brag, I accept, falls a little flat. Stornoway have arrived already, and I cannot discover them, only depict them as accurately – and hence as glowingly – as I can. In the invidious classifications of their industry, this band have easily been subsumed under the banner of the “alternative”, and it is important to express first just how effective an alternative to the alternative Stornoway in fact are. Their lyrics in such beautifully assembled songs as Boats & Trains and Fuel Up make sense by the standards of music, poetry and fiction, are largely audible, always articulate, and unfailingly moving. Their instrumentality falls into a number of broad approaches; the slow moving, quiet backdrop, the frenetic, almost military jig, and in the case of The November Song, relatively rarely played and harder to find online than much of the band’s output, a solo vocal effectiveness more reminiscent of singer-songwriters and troubadours than a band at all.

That last number, which I had never heard before, is written and performed by Brian Briggs, a man with one of those names welded for alliterative fame who nevertheless seems to have a taste for a tranquil private life. Especially given that he was performing to his core following of chronically romantically unfortunate Oxford undergraduates, Briggs took a risk in displaying a chanson d’amour of inner contentment and advertising it as such, even, it must be said nauseatingly, dedicating The November Song to “everyone in the audience lucky enough to have a soulmate”. It is a proof of the song’s quality that it overrode even this reviewer’s scepticism, and instead of acting as a tonal gloat captured the idea of love as an all-important but vulnerable aspect of life.

Brigg’s November Song preamble also displayed an element of Stornoway’s characteristic technique that is evident in their name; a folkloric connection to imaginative geography, that leaves every place name to embody a significance that is emotional, literary and traditional all at once. When Jarvis Cocker sings “she came from Greece”, he is gesturing to a vague idea of spivvy opulence. A folksong like Fairport Convention’s Sir Patrick Spens mentions Aberdeen for legendary reasons without significance outside tradition. Stornoway go for the heritage and the associations at once. November Song’s connection to the Pembrokeshire hills associates successful love with isolation from the world, but Briggs was also clearly, specifically, in the Pembrokeshire hills at the time and wanted to pin them down. It is this specificity about Stornoway’s songwriting that has allowed them to create what might be called the local national anthem of Cowley, Zorbing. When this band name a place they hallow it.

The magnetically popular Zorbing and the far more lyrically accomplished On The Rocks were deployed in what Briggs called “a really experimental moment”. The band were thrilled to be in the Sheldonian but aware of the changed atmosphere it imposed upon them; playing under a restored Baroque ceiling three centuries old with strict orders against standing or stamping in the audience. Stornoway reacted with an appealing combination of reverence and subversion. They combined operations, and shared their platform, with the Oxford Millennium Orchestra, one of whose violinists they are in the habit of borrowing. But Briggs kept a thumbnail on his rock-star’s honour by leading his audience in a group scream at the event’s conclusion.

As for the orchestral contribution, it was a musical experiment but perhaps also a qualitative risk. In a way that felt slightly allegorical of Music Today, our “alternative” pop heroes never failed to prove themselves more competent musicians than the smartly accoutred ensemble. The Millennium Orchestra momentarily resembled a classical bribe that had bought Stornoway the Sheldonian, and their warm-up act of some drearily rendered Mendelssohn and rather better Vaughan Williams instigated some audience impatience. But they redeemed any such charge by the excellence of their support to Zorbing and, particularly, On the Rocks. When an obviously deeply affected Briggs muttered it was the “best night of his life”, few in the audience had any doubt he was referring to the unforeseen and overwhelming success of this peculiar synthesis.

I’ve long had doubts about whether Zorbing deserves its place as the most widely circulated and reputed part of Stornoway’s achievement. When overlistened to, the song exposes wilfully trite rhymes and emotional truisms that fall short of much of the band’s originality. The Oxford resonances will ensure this song never fails to be welcome round here, however.

To secure their national standing (and this is not an absurd statement – Stornoway have just had a spin with Jools), the band are more likely to hit home with the song that provoked the wildest positive reaction from the audience, the funny and frightening We Are The Battery Human. This reminds its hearers of Stornoway’s consistent protest credentials; an early masterpiece, not alas performed in the Sheldonian, was the fabulously unmusical Good Fish Guide, a ranting sermon upon what fish we should and shouldn’t eat. We Are The Battery Human strikes simultaneous targets – by imagery, of course, shackled poultry, but explicitly, in a Luddite and Romantic vein, the present servitude of humanity to technology – “We were born to be free/…Range”. It has, inevitably, become a hit on the internet.