Martin Carthy with Peggy Seeger & Guests
Purcell Room, London SE1

Peggy Seeger sits down, closes her eyes and sings, high and reedy, the ballad of Georgie, or Geordie, in which a young woman pleads for her lover’s life - to no avail, of course: this is folk music: tales of love, war and cruel death that will resonate with unusual force this evening.

Songmaker, eco-feminist, half-sister of Pete; the woman who smote Ewan MacColl at first sight – Seeger, you feel, spends a lot of time resonating. Now 69, living with her second partner, Irene, she puts on a rare masterclass here, flitting between funny and angry, banjo, guitar, Steinway and autoharp – on old age, Bush (‘he’s a bad man, a mad man... a chosen-by-chad man’) and bombs; deploying her own payload in a song about her four abortions. Her hour up, she thanks us for our attention.

More riveting still are father-and-daughter act Martin Carthy and Eliza Carthy (sadly mum Norma Waterson was absent) – Eliza, the double-stopping fiddler and heart-stopping vocalist; Carthy senior’s picked guitar thinking out loud beneath roundly enunciated lyrics that suck you in, on The Bows of London and Bill Norrie, which climaxes in a beheading. For light relief, brother-in-law Mike Waterson, in flat cap and a bad jumper, a beguilingly unreformed, hand-over-the-ear singer of bawdy ballads.