The Unthanks – Live in Colne 2025 – “relaxed commitment to the music”

Pendle Hippodrome Theatre, Colne 1^st December 2025

Celebrating twenty years of treading an individual path, The Unthanks are playing a beautiful and characterful venue in Colne. Opened in 1914, it is run by friendly volunteers and laid out in a delightfully convoluted way. The hall itself is wood-clad and great to look at, drawing lots of praise from Rachel and Becky Unthank, themselves fond of the indirect and unusual. Their twenty year show, instead of focusing on the ‘hits’ (though we get a few), plots some of their delightful diversions, including their most recent one. It’s a celebration of a meandering path, following their interests.

There’s some banter tonight about Bradford (in the White Rose county, while we’re in Red Rose country), where the sisters and Adrian composed music and spent a week providing a live soundtrack for a play that fused Shameless with Cormac McCarthy. They play a sample song and it’s gloriously lovely and downbeat, with a chorus that goes: “keening and grieving”. “It’s even darker than an Unthanks concert”, says Becky. It’s not the first play or film they’ve written for and their career covers collaborations with the Grimethorpe Colliery brass band as well as covers of Robert Wyatt, Anthony Johnson, The Pretenders and Molly Drake (Nick’s mum). Niopha Keegan, a long-time semi-member adds to the vocals and adds her violin to the yearning melodies.

The opener tonight makes me smile; the first Unthanks song I heard; Cyril Tawney’s ‘On A Monday Morning’ (“too soon to be out of me bed”). They follow it with songs from their Shipbuilding collaboration project, including Elvis Costello’s ever-heartbreaking ‘Shipbuilding’, a Molly Drake song, a singalong and a clog dance. A couple of Robert Wyatt songs are a highlight, with the gorgeously loving ‘Sea Song’ showing off what makes the band so great. Becky sings the lead, Rachel taps a slow rhythm with her foot and it ends with a lengthy wordless vocal duet, twining harmonies.

This is a band in close tune with their audience and Adrian McNally gives a heartfelt apology for accidentally using Ticketmaster for sales and offers to make up for it. We get a small slab of ‘hits’ amongst the pokes into the corners of The Unthanks’ musical journey. ‘Magpie’ from the Mercury-nominated ‘Mount The Air’ is tied with ‘The Scarecrow Knows’ from their soundtrack for Worzel Gummidge. The other biggie is ‘King Of Rome’ about a champion pigeon from Derby and they delight in telling us the bird is stuffed and can be seen in Derby museum.

Clearly happy to be in a characterful venue, facing a sold-out crowd, the sense of relaxed commitment to the music is palpable. That’s quite an achievement, coming from, as Becky tells it, learning just enough songs that they could get themselves into folk festivals for free. She says that once Adrian organised them, they were off and away. And here they are, twenty years on, with a twisting, weaving thread of music, held together by special breathy Northern voices and a determination to follow the muse. This is a consistently different band and always worth an evening of my time.