Bright Phoebus Revisited, Barbican - music review

Back in 1972, Lal and Mike Waterson's beautiful and seductively strange Bright Phoebus caused a minor folk ripple before the album seemingly disappeared for ever. The brother and sister died in 1998 and 2011 respectively, having never performed the lost classic live and it has never had a proper CD (let alone download) release. Yet its mythical status has waxed over the decades.

On Friday the intermarrying, interplaying Waterson-Carthy folk-royalty clan breathed wondrous life into these mostly unheard songs, via impossibly jolly ensemble romps or spooked, desperately bereft balladeering. Even Jarvis Cocker of novelty band Pulp enhanced rather than swamped proceedings with glorious vocal turns on Scarecrow and The Beast (“nobody’s heard this one, so you won’t know if I get it wrong”), but the real star was the impossibly vivacious third Waterson sibling and clan matriarch, 74-year-old Norma. Her bickering with fiddle-playing daughter Eliza Carthy was laugh-out-loud funny, but her self-loathing rendition of the drunkard’s lament Red Wine & Promises was beyond heartbreaking.

Shockingly, the original Bright Phoebus remains in the vaults (“I hope tonight changes certain people’s myopic thinking and they release these fucking songs,” noted another guest, Richard Hawley) and why BBC4 hasn’t shared this extraordinary saga is a modern-day mystery. No matter: this was special.