A magnificent farewell: Stornoway, at Womad Festival, reviewed

The greatest pleasure of writing about pop music – even more than the free tickets and records, nice as they are – is seeing some tiny, as yet unnoticed act and being dazzled by them, then taking every chance you can to wang on about them until other people start to feel the same. Music writers tend not to have many opportunities to do something good – alas, Nick Kent did not expose the thalidomide scandal; it wasn’t Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs who got to the bottom of Watergate – but it’s truly gratifying when a band you have championed rises from the toilet circuit, even if they never make it to the stadiums.

I first saw Stornoway, a folk-pop group from Oxford, bottom of the bill in a pub basement in 2009. Gosh, they were terrific – songs that oozed melody, unusual and unselfconscious lyrics, and plenty of shy charm – and I thoroughly abused my position editing the Guardian’s Friday arts section to mention them in the paper as often as I could. I got hold of a CD of their demos and played it in the car so much that the whole family fell in love with them.

Stornoway didn’t get to the stadiums, but they did get signed to the revered indie label 4AD. They released a debut album that went silver, followed it with three more, and filled theatre-sized venues. Then, in 2017, they split, peacefully and with goodwill. So it was a surprise to see them on the bill for Womad, the annual shindig for all things world music. It turned out to be a one-off – well, a two-off; there was a warm-up show as well. They were opening a tent stage on the festival’s last day, traditionally the least forgiving slot – a hungover audience, in greenhouse conditions, who’ve had to drag themselves from their tents.

You’d have thought this was a headline show: Stornoway were magnificent, and clearly bowled over by the response. They deserved it. The songs have not been diminished by time or familiarity. ‘Fuel Up’, a sombre reflection on ageing delivered from the perspective of a young adult, was gorgeous melodically, but also, as one fellow music writer noted to me the other day, had a lyric so good you might never repeat it in your career: ‘Curled up in the back of the car/ Nine years old you don’t know where you are/ And your head’s on the window, your eyes are just closed/ There’s a voice in the front and a hush on the road.’ Anyone who doesn’t feel a rush back to childhood from those words was never a child. Or they travelled by private jet.

The arrangements and melodies were perfect, complemented by wonderful harmonies that located the unlikely midpoint between the Beach Boys and the Watersons. It was highlight after highlight – ‘Get Low’, ‘Farewell Applachia’, a concluding ‘Zorbing’ that saw the crowd yelling for an encore, until the stage manager came out and said they couldn’t mess up the schedule. If this was their last ever show, what a way to go. My wife and I emerged from the tent with eyes blurred by tears.

Simply Red’s outdoor show in the grounds of Hatfield House in Hertfordshire was less emotionally complicated. It’s so easy to dismiss Mick Hucknall as another purveyor of sleek saloon-car pop, but he’s far more than that. This was a set of perfectly crafted songs, played by a band drilled fit to troop the colour. At 62, Hucknall’s voice is so well preserved it’s a miracle, and it felt lovely to be in a crowd who really didn’t care about coolness or the next big thing, and just wanted to dance and drink and feel young.

Still, Hucknall made his points. His group isn’t called Simply Red because of the colour of his hair, and despite this looking like a crowd who might have a lot of time for Liz Truss, he slipped in his socialism – ‘Come To My Aid’ came early in the set, as did ‘Your Mirror’. ‘Money’s Too Tight (To Mention)’, the Valentine Brothers cover that was his breakthrough hit in 1985, closed the set, and seemed more relevant than at any time since then.

I don’t think anyone noticed, to be honest, and I’m not sure Hucknall minded. Interviewing him in these pages a few years back, I called him ‘Britain’s greatest underappreciated pop star’. I think that’s true, critically, but everyone at Hatfield Park appreciated him. We left as the park had all but emptied, a group of women ahead of us clutching on to each other to stay vertical. ‘Iiiiiiiiiiiiii … wanna fall from the stars,’ they caterwauled, joyfully and tunelessly, ‘straight into your arms.’