The Round Chapel handsome historic building sits in the middle of Hackney, one of London’s most vibrant boroughs. Staying true to its alternative cultural roots, it was the perfect setting for a magical evening featuring the vastly innovative folk singer, artist and activist, Sam Lee, supported by a gifted band featuring percussion, piano, violin and double-bass.
The concert was based on Lee’s recent fourth studio album, Songdreaming, launched in March and recorded throughout 2023, and imbued with a world of instrumentation including the Arabic Qanun, Swedish Nyckelharpa, and small pipes.
The haunting ditty of ‘Sweet Girl McRee’ transported the audience to “Banna’s lonely shore” in a remote corner of the Shetland islands, affirming Lee’s journey charting the natural world of Britain as his leading lyrical regard. In his own words, he characterises the album as “a mosaic of the emotions felt in my time outdoors, that artistically emerge in reflective moments when I’m permitted to recount and articulate the complexity of all I witness and thus feel responsible for”.
That sense of responsibility towards our fragile ecosystems was enforced by ‘Leaves of Life’, with its subtle gospel innuendos but a clear warning of our dismal legacy to the future generation:
“There comes children seven
And one by one they’ll come to ask
What have we done to heaven…”
That communion with nature inspired his unique ‘Singing with nightingales’ project, when, in springtime, guests, after been fortified by fireside food, drink and storytelling, are invited to an after-dark walk in the woods of Sussex or Gloucestershire, where Sam and other musicians join in an improvised duet with the birds. As nightingale habitats face threats from climate change and rural development, this work opens a channel to remembering and protecting their enchanting voices.
The sitting arrangement at the front of the Chapel had the feeling of an old-time campfire, with some of the audience squatting on the floor, reminiscent of the summer open air concerts by the Fire Choir, run by the Nest Collective, an initiative founded by Lee in the Culpeper garden in Islington. That commitment to community projects is a permanent feature of his work.
Towards the end of the evening we were treated to ‘Bushes and Briars’, another song that reinforces Lee’s indignation at the treatment and condition of the natural world:
“Sometimes I’m uneasy
And troubled in my mind
Sometimes I think we’ve gone too far
To turn it round in time
Sometimes I’m plagued
By all I should and must
And what we’ll leave behind…”
Despite the melancholy emerging from the lyrics, the eerie crescendo of the tune guided all to a grand finale imbued of hope, and a resolution to carry on with our dreams of resurgence, clearing a space in the mind to consider a more equitable future.
