Folk review: Heidi Talbot; Musselburgh Brunton Theatre

There’s a long and somewhat chequered history of Irish female singers broadening their stylistic range from the traditional to anodyne folk-pop.

Thankfully, Kildare-born Heidi Talbot (now based in Edinburgh) has developed a genre-blurring repertoire – here taking in a Tom Waits cover, a co-write with King Creosote and an Appalachian love song, alongside more traditionally Celtic fare – without sacrificing the vocal individuality and interpretative finesse that originally marked her out. And while introducing your backing line-up as “three of the best musicians a girl could hope to have in her band” might sometimes be a matter of conventional courtesy, in this case it was no exaggeration, denoting as it did Talbot’s husband John McCusker on fiddle, cittern and whistle, plus guitarists extraordinaire Ian Carr and Kris Drever, the latter also on mandolin.

Having recently finished recording her latest solo album, Talbot is soon to release a spin-off EP from those studio sessions, My Sister the Moon, ahead of the LP’s launch in January. This well-attended Musselburgh show was the first in a short Scottish tour, presumably to road-test and bed in the new material. There were indeed a few rough edges to her performance – intermittently wobbly intonation; some overly diffident, semi-mumbled diction; a general aura of uncertainty pervading a few numbers – but they were far outweighed by its strengths, especially her exquisitely nuanced vocal blend of fragility and sinew, honey and fire, together with the new songs’ ambitious continued expansion of her palette, and of course the consistently classy accompaniment.

Rating: * * *