The first of two consecutive nights at Snape, Wednesday saw us taking a chance on the progressive of the Québecois roots band Le Vent Du Nord. A chance in the sense that we’d heard little of their recorded work, although I’m convinced that we did previously catch a portion of their set at one of our early sojourns to the Cambridge Folk Festival.
Since the band started out in 2002, Le Vent du Nord have been winning critical acclaim and a great fan base across Europe, Oceania and America. We can see why, because the band certainly delivers melodic, innovative songs and instrumentals and whilst some are taken from the Québec traditional folk repertoire, many are excellent original compositions. They deliver a rich and varied instrumentation (hurdy gurdy anyone), and all four appear to be excellent vocalists. The material is all sung in French, which was tricky, but the witty and informative song introductions were all delivered in English so we certainly got the context, with many songs majoring on the French Canadian culture, heritage and experience within the wider Canadian mainstream. It was good to see the Maltings Hall virtually full and of all the gigs we’ve been to this Proms, the reaction to the band was probably the most enthusiastic and vocal that we’ve seen, deservedly so. Based on what little we knew, we took a chance and for us the evening turned out to be one of the highlights of the Proms programme.