Music

FOLK queens The Unthanks invite us into the darkly passionate world of Emily Bronte, with a song cycle bearing all the quiet beauty the duo are known and loved for.

Commissioned to mark Bronte’s 200th birthday, Yorkshire-born Unthanks composer Adrian McNally has turned 10 of her poems into song, performed with sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank and recorded in the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth.

Captured and released as Part 3 of Lines - a trilogy of records inspired by female writers across time - this live performance of the Emily Bronte Song Cycle will also feature songs from other records that make

up Lines.

Rachel and Becky Unthank grew up in a village on the south bank of the Tyne in Gateshead, next to the border with Northumberland. One of the most innovative and critically acclaimed bands on the folk scene, they create and perform ‘art folk’ with an approach to storytelling that blends starch traditionalism and sonic adventure, glacial minimalism and heartbreaking poignancy.

Their army of fans includes actors Mackenzie Crook, Maxine Peake, Stephen Mangam and Martin Freeman, author Nick Hornby, singers Elvis Costello and Rosanne Cash, comics and actors Dawn French and Adrian Edmondson, and members of Portishead and Radiohead.

“There are few times when you hear an album or discover a band and they stalk immediately to the heart of everything you love and hold dear,” says Maxine Peake.

The support act for this show will be The Bookshop Band. Described as “the offspring of an artistic love-affair between a duo of English folk singer-songwriters and a multi-award winning independent bookshop in the UK, Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights”, The Bookshop Band write and perform songs inspired by hundreds of authors, from Shakespeare to Philip Pullman.

l The Unthanks perform the Emily Bronte Song Cycle at St George’s Hall on Thursday. Call (01274) 432000.