Union Chapel, London
Getting together to have some fun with other people’s songs, the folk-soul pairing made soft-rock magic out of silken harmonies
London folkie Flo Morrissey and souly Virginia singer/producer Matthew E White discovered each other in 2015, when White spotted a review of Morrissey’s debut single on the Guardian website and was curious enough to click the link. He followed with an admiring tweet, which led to the pair covering the Lee Hazlewood song Some Velvet Morning at a Hazlewood memorial gig in London. An emboldened White then invited Morrissey to sing on one of his own songs at his studio in Richmond, Virginia. “And she said: ‘Absolutely not,’” White recalls tonight, avuncular and good humoured. Standing to his right, Morrissey protests: “I was quite busy.”
The upshot: she went to Richmond last summer, and 10 days later the pair had made a notable album, Gentlewoman, Ruby Man. Comprised of cover versions, some of them surprising (their laconic remodelling of Grease raises the bar to an impossible height for all future Barry Gibb covers), it provides the context for tonight’s show. Morrissey and White perform all but one track from it, as well as one solo song apiece, and come out the other end with a claim to being a one-night-stand Carpenters.
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