David Ford returned to Manchester and the hallowed setting of Halle St Peter's as part of Manchester Folk Festival on Thursday night. A career spanning set delighted a mix of older fans and won over many of the festival attendees.
Matthew And The Atlas opened the evening with a forty-five minute set of well-crafted acoustic songs delivered on one guitar - he told us half way through as he retuned that he'd brought a second guitar case but had forgotten to put the guitar in it. With nearly two decades of songwriting behind him, Matthew has crafted songs with emotional depth and an intensity that hold the audience's attention and there's absolute silence as he delivers the likes of Record Store, Out Of The Darkness and the set-closer Elijah save for the clinking sound from the bar and the occasional shuffle of an uncomfortable seat.
Quite how David Ford classes as folk is a question for another day. David tries to logic it as him writing songs about people, but a man with a set-up that includes a mic stand doubling as a drum machine, multiple loop pedals and a loud electric guitar pushes the definition to its boundaries. The one thing guaranteed, and we have twenty years plus of evidence to back up this fact, is that no two David Ford sets will ever be the same, such is the way he pushes the songs into new territories, looking for new arrangements and approaches and accompanied by an ever-revolving group of accomplices.
Tonight he has Ed Blunt playing keyboards for most of the set and Daisy Chute joining on backing vocals for part of it. Although when he delivers a gorgeous I'm Alright Now and a cover of Bob Dylan's Sister, from his upcoming project to recreate Dylan's Desire album for its fiftieth anniversary, it's more of a duet than anything else.
It's that creative restlessness that has probably meant David hasn't hit the heights commercially that many of us think he deserves. He slaps us down in the set-closer Everytime where he acknowledges that his own decisions and direction have often been the cause. Wrapped up in a song that jumps from fragile almost-not-there acoustic to a full-on racket with screaming without pausing for breath, the song itself tells that story.
The set is full of glorious contradictions. The romp of Pour A Little Poison, about a disastrous tour of the US Deep South, the anti-Trump The Wall Has Come Between Us and Two Shots, possibly the only song lauding the scientific genius behind the COVID vaccine that allowed musicians to start to go out and tour again when everything looked bleak combine with the quiet introspection of I Don't Care What You Call Me and the chaotic loop-pedal monster that is State Of The Union, to deliver a seventy-five minute set that never stands still and holds the audience rapt under his spell.
A man who is at peace with his lot the fickle hand of the music business has delivered him, David Ford continues to astound more than twenty years after he started his solo post-Easyworld life in the basement of bars in London where we first witnessed him.
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