CityLife

Rachel Unthank and The Winterset @ Playhouse 2

THEY are 10-1 outsiders for the Nationwide Mercury Prize and, despite my Manc loyalty to fellow contenders Elbow, I might just have a punt on the 'token folkies'. And I'll be sticking pins into dolls of Estelle and Adele.

If the Playhouse audience had a vote the Unthank sisters, Rachel and Becky, with sidekicks Steph and Niopha, would be carrying off the coveted award on September 9. It was that level of beguiling performance - the kind that fires home how vital a force folk still is through a new generation.

The besotted interviewer who insisted they are Geordie roots music's equivalent to Girls Aloud had a weird point. The Mercury judges usually seek a fresh, sexy face when sticking folk album in the mix - Seth Lakeman or Eliza Carthy, say - but the Winterset lasses offer a sturdily independent yet sophisticated neo-feminist take on the genre.

The bulk of the Shaw set was from the nominated album, The Bairns, given five stars by my colleague Alan Brownlee on its release, but they kicked off with On A Monday Morning, from acclaimed debut album Cruel Sister, the ultimate hangover woe album, which set the tone for an evening of self-deprecrating, canny humour, epecially from kid sister Becky.

Perfectly suited

Her throaty, keening voice also perfectly suited the desolate Blue Breezing Blind Drunk, where a woman contemplates revenge through booze for an ill-fated, abusive marriage. She was sublime later in Robert Wyatt's sinister masterpiece, Sea Song - with lyrics that put the sick into sea.

If that all sounds a bit heavy, well folk does deal in doomy tales of desperate pregnant servant girls and sailors perishing at sea (or even worse having a wild time far across the ocean from their forlorn spouse).

The Unthanks spared us none of this, but they also offered oodles of sexy jauntiness, even slipping a bout of clog dancing into the helter-skelter duetting of Blue's Gaen Oot O'the Fashion. Sexy clog dancing? You had to be there.

Since The Bairns the band have lost redoubtable keyboardist Belinda O'Hooley, but her replacement, blonde svelte cocktail-dressed Steph Conner - the posh one - contributes her own skittish sense of drama to the piano part on I Wish, one of their signature ditties.

It's a tragic traditional song about a pregnant girl, who wishes to be a maid again but never can be ''until apples grow on an orange tree''.

Harmony

Both Steph and violinist/accordionist Niopha Keegan shared vocal harmony duties in a near flawless set that strayed into strange tongues. For the enthralling Border Rievers ballad Felton Lonnin, it was just a case of impenetrable Northumbrian dialect (in Away From Hexhamshire the audience were encouraged to attempt their own Geordie accents in the chorus).

Betond this the lasses encored with an a capella rendering of The Unst Ferry in Shetland's ancient Norn language - reminding us at the close of their true folk roots. Unthank's not a stage name - it comes from an old north east word for squatter on somebody else's land, apparently.

And Winterset? That's the name of a reservoir near the Barnsley home of Rachel's husband/manager Adrian's family. Half of the songs on Cruel Sister were recorded there. How do I know this? His dad was sitting next to me at the Playhouse 2 - a warm intimate venue neither the band or I had visited before.

A Mercury victory would hardly push them from such accessibility to stadium status, but I don't think even mega success would turn these hinnies' heads. Buy the album now.

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