Sunday September 7th 2025
ADRA Promotions as part of The Victoria Theatre’s Antidote series presents …
Bridget Hayden and the Apparitions
Acclaimed Todmorden trio conjure dark takes on traditional folk songs feat. members of samandtheplants. “… one of the greatest renditions of them all” – Uncut
https://bridgethayden.bandcamp.com/album/cold-blows-the-rain
Ancient Hostility
Songs about heartbreak and resistance from Liverpudlian harmony singing and drone trio feat. members of All In Vain and Dawn Ray'd.
https://ancienthostilityfolk.bandcamp.com/album/sing-as-loud-as-you-can
Green Room Bar at The Victoria Theatre, 2 Fountain St, Halifax HX1 1BP
First act 7pm. Finished by 9:30pm.
£12.50 /£10.50 from
https://victoriatheatre.co.uk/whats-on/antidote-sep25
--- Further Info ---
Bridget Hayden and the Apparitions
The reinterpreted traditional folk songs that make up Cold Blows the Rain are shaped by the land and the weather. Wrapped in mist and drizzle, the crawling drone of low heavy clouds on flat-top moors. The sound of the dark Calder Valley floor and sun starved hills around Todmorden, West Yorkshire in the North of England.
“Bridget Hayden and the Apparitions start the year with traditional songs as heavy as the sodden moors at midnight. They unfurl at a glacial pace, with analogue synths and delicate banjos buoying up Hayden’s deep, measured voice.” The Guardian 'Folk Album of the Month'
“Trad folk songs, hauntingly interpreted.... Hayden has pulled off one of the greatest renditions of them all.” Uncut 'Album of the Month'
“Bridget Hayden’s folk music is the kind that makes you stop and pay attention.” The Quietus
‘The album, to me at least, contains real tenderness and hope. It’s not always all that obvious, shrouded beneath the ethereal mists, but sit quietly and explore and you’ll find comfort, resolution and enduring beauty. ‘ – Dirty Sunbeams
“Hayden has a long, peerless pedigree in the broad realm of British underground experimental music. She cut her teeth in the Leeds avant rock/improv/free folk collective Vibracathedral Orchestra, and as a sometime collaborator with US outsiders Sunburned Hand Of The Man and British alternative veterans The Telescopes. These are all groups whose MO involves jumping off a rock face and embracing the free fall, however sticky the end may be. Since her 2011 solo album An Indifferent Ocean, she has become adept in sculpting intimate drone/noise artefacts, notched and pitted like potsherds pulled from the Yorkshire earth. Her more recent contributions to Folklore Tapes (including several collaborations featuring Apparitions member Sam McLoughlin) have refined this approach. In the past few years Hayden and McLoughlin have teamed up with Richard Chamberlain in Schisms. Their ultra-lo-fi fuzzball psychedelic improv can be exhilarating, but exists on a very different planet (or at least in a far muggier climate) than the exquisite acoustic snowglobe of Cold Blows The Rain.
The Apparitions are well named. The arrangements, sparse but never parched, are an ethereal blend of Hayden’s banjo, cello and synth; Sam McLoughlin’s harmonium and Dan Bridgewood-Hill’s violin. On tunes like “When I Was In My Prime” and “Factory Girl”, plucked banjo stalks across vibrating strings and squeezed air, like a skeleton tiptoeing through a field of windblown grass.
By their nature, folk songs are like ghosts. They keep insisting on being sung, again and again, returning to haunt the singers who voice them, and we who listen. They seem to know us, adapting to our own times and our current ways of hearing. It’s only when they remain bogged down in customs and traditions that they seem smaller, under control, exorcised of their power. Perhaps it’s this that makes “The Unquiet Grave” such a perfect end note to this album. Appearing in the Child Ballads published in 1860, “The Unquiet Grave” is one of those archetypal works of folk art whose central mythology can be traced back to ancient Greek, Roman and Norse folklore. A dead woman’s spirit returns to tell her abandoned lover to pipe down after a year of wailing. Otherwise she can’t rest in peace. And he can’t join her in death, as he wishes, because then their hearts would wither away. Perversely, this mordant lyric is as much about living the earthly life to the full, even as it focuses on the minutiae of grief and loss. Scores of artists have recorded this song since the Second World War, yet by suppressing all sense of melodrama and focusing on the pure emotion of the situation, Hayden has pulled off one of the greatest renditions of them all.” - Rob Young in Uncut (4.5 stars)
https://www.uncut.co.uk/reviews/bridget-hayden-and-the-apparitions-cold-blows-the-rain-148279/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jan/03/bridget-hayden-and-the-apparitions-cold-blows-the-rain-review
Ancient Hostility
Ancient Hostility combine traditional folk singing with stories of modern day resistance and struggle, personal reflection and heartbreak, acoustic drone and a love of heavy metal.
Lyrics that move from fiercely political to soberingly honest are sung in close harmony, giving occasional space to contemplative drones on Concertina and Violin. Simon Barr (Dawn Ray'd, We Came Out Like Tigers) and Ash Ludd (All In Vain) play a music based in tradition that refuses to be retrospective, instead signal boosting the struggles that we face in the here and now. Finding harmony in contrast, relief in honesty, and hope in the darkness, Ancient Hostility are calming songs for turbulent times.
‘Mostly (but not only) sublimated by their demands sung in polyphony, it's a call to resistance and antifascist hope that Ancient Hostility reveals to us through this first brilliant album. A captivating Folk made by the working class, for the working class. Sing as loud as you can comrades’ - Bandcamp
Antidote is a programme of artistes that see things from a slightly different point of view, for audiences who like to challenge their understanding of live music and features some of the UK's finest performers. Each event is unique and guest curated by Andy Abbott (ADRA Promotions).
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