Songs of God, murder, love, death, incest and cunnilingus. Those last two aside, you can see why Johnny Cash covered Will Oldham's song I See a Darkness. The version that Oldham - alias Bonnie Prince Billy - sings shortly before the end of an almost two-hour solo set is given a new arrangement. It is serene, almost sweet, with the most pure and elegant vocals and the most muted and minimal guitar. But then the Louisville, Kentucky singer-songwriter always could do warm and tender. It only made his sparse, perverse, sombre hillbilly blues all the more spooky by contrast.
Cecil Sharp House is the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, but Oldham's is a decidedly scarier brand of folk than the domestic variety: this is what happened when English pastoral got dragged across the Atlantic and deep into the Appalachians. As for the dancing, Oldham obliges with eccentric Pythonesque leg-lifts and shuffles. Making up the set list as he goes along, he asks the audience for requests and questions, all the while stroking the autoharp (a sort of zither) with which he accompanies the first eight songs of the show. The instrument is a relatively new addition - Oldham started playing it a few months back while opening for Björk, and seems taken with its simplicity and sparkle. When someone in the crowd asks what it is, he shoots back: "It's an extension of my right rib cage. My father was a piano, it's all I have left of him. I have my mother's eyes." He also has a forehead higher than a tower block and copious whiskers, although the huge Deliverance beard has been reduced to a rather obscene tuft.
Occasionally he will stop and explain a lyric ("hosing", mentioned in a song about the life-enhancing qualities of death, we are told "means making love"), or break into a whistle or howl, dividing up the starker material with twisted folk singalongs like Just to See My Holly Home and the fine A King at Night. Oldham's live performances can be unpredictable, but here, on this unassuming stage, in a place so quiet you can hear a bottle drop, he is clearly enjoying himself. The result is magical.
