Blood & Honey

Three musicians utterly committed to singing the traditional songs of these islands and doing so while maintaining a great sense of adventure along with an obvious enjoyment of the music and a pride in their own abilities as musicians. ……Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy MBE

The Devils Interval are: Jim Causley Lauren McCormick Emily Portman

Having previously been impressed both by Jims solo singing and Lauren and Emilys duo work, I came across the unique sound of The Devils Interval when American musician Jeff Davis played me Songlinks, a CD of transatlantically migrated traditional songs, on which he’d performed. We listened through the groups arrangement of The Cuckoo, stopped the playback and sat in stunned silence for a matter of minutes before pressing the back button and playing it over again. Their setting pulls off the seemingly impossible feat of taking an unusual version of a well-known song and treating every verse to different and highly sophisticated harmonisation, while sounding entirely natural, spontaneous and unforced. It was an approach I’d enjoyed previously from Emily and Lauren together, but the addition of Jims voice mostly taking a low baritone part, occasionally leaping up to the high tenor lent it a whole extra dimension. The performance combines roller coaster exhilaration with a thumping emotional punch: the most exciting rendition of an English folk song Id heard in years…..Brian Peters from an fRoots article.