Thursday 21st May 2026
The Trades Club, Hebden Bridge, England
Act I: The Exorcism
Lately I have come to feel that my satnav must be sentient. Whether possessed by sprite, daemon or merely by one of Shady Sam Altman’s AI tentacles, it has developed a knack of diverting me from the straight and common path and onto the road less travelled.
Not that I am complaining, for in doing so it seems to have a flair for the romantic, or at least the serendipitous. The first time it waylaid me, travelling down to the Biddulph valley for a Kassi Valazza concert, it prompted me away from the A-road and onto a long, rural dirt track in the pitch-black of autumn evening, where I thought if my car broke down I’d had it, and then passed alone under a disturbing, isolated bridge of the sort where murders happen in Stephen King novels, and then, finally, as I was swearing freely at both the satnav and at myself for blindly trusting it, I crested the top of a hill and saw the whole valley laid open before me, the lights of the town dotted across it like fireflies in the dark.
If the satnav had been trying to harm me that night, it was far kinder on the day I headed to Cambridgeshire for an airshow last year. Anticipating a dull slog of a car journey down the grey, featureless M6 to Birmingham before turning east, the satnav instead took me east straight out of Manchester, through the beauty of the Peak District and then the Great North Road past fields of Lincolnshire green. I vividly recall the moment when, on Yorkshire’s high ground, I finally turned the car south and saw, under a blue summer sky completely absent of cloud, the entire length of England stretched out below, so clear and vivid it seemed as though I could see all the way to the Channel.
Tonight the satnav is kind again. Rather than preparing for me a route straight to Hebden Bridge, where Toria Wooff and her band will be playing in a couple of hours, unbeknownst to me it diverts me across the sparse and scenic moorland near Blackstone Edge. This is a deeply fitting approach for the music I am due to hear tonight, because Toria Wooff’s brand of folk music is influenced by the moors near her hometown of Horwich. Just as when I saw her live in Chester, where the satnav diverted me across the River Dee, dark and latent under slow-moving mist, this drive across the moorland feels appropriate. ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’ comes to my mind, hours before Toria will play it herself on the stage of the Trades Club.
That Toria will play the song is one of the few certainties I can look forward to tonight. Because while I saw Toria play live five times last year, this is the first time I’ve seen her play in what is billed as a “full band” show. Aside from a one-off show in Bury where she was backed by the orchestral strings of the Manchester Camerata, my previous experiences of Toria have seen her accompanied solely by Polly Virr, ever-present on the cello.
Here in Hebden Bridge Polly remains on the cello, but this time she and Toria welcome Danny Miller on bass (both double and electric) and the multi-instrumentalist Dan Bridgwood-Hill, known as ‘DBH’, who contributes keys, lap steel and fiddle. While not an official The Toria Wooff Band – Toria’s partner and producer James Wyatt, another ever-present figure, mentions to a couple within earshot of me that the group’s been debating whether it can be called a band if there’s no drummer – it’s an ambitious configuration of musicians for an independent artist.
Aside from an unannounced warm-up gig in a pub in Chester a week earlier, this is Toria’s first headline gig since her stunning Christmas show last year. The buzz of the crowd lends the truth to that; a couple of hundred fans, having subsisted on a lean, Wooff-less diet for the last five months, fill the hall in anticipation. Some, Toria later remarks delightedly, are already wearing her t-shirts.
As the band assemble on stage, I still don’t know what to expect. The absence of electric guitar and – yes – a drummer means there’s unlikely to be any seismic ‘Dylan goes electric’ shift in Toria’s sound tonight. But how will the songs, both old and new, sound with the bass and with DBH’s assortment of instruments? Those who follow Toria live and have come to love her music know she has been working on a new album and has played some of its songs at previous gigs. Will those songs develop further? Will tonight reveal how they will sound on the upcoming record?
I don’t have to wait long for an answer. After Toria and her band take the stage, the song they begin with is the unreleased ‘Noiselessly’. I first heard the song in Chester in October, and tonight the band break it open and give it an extra dimension with the soundscape they build, emphasising the “light up your mind” refrain Toria sings. Underneath though, the song remains the delicate lament that I heard in Chester, a sign that although Toria is now backed by a band she will be conservative in their use. The songs themselves remain the important thing: the only right decision from an artist who is proving to be one of the most consistently compelling songwriters I have encountered.
‘Noiselessly’ is Toria’s latest ode to her lost friend Alicia, and is followed in the set by two others, ‘Song for A’ and ‘Sweet William’. “There’s a part of me that died when you did too”, one of the lyrics of ‘Noiselessly’ runs, and the absence of her friend – who remains unnamed tonight – is clearly an important part of Toria’s creative identity. But just as we know departed friends would not want us to be sad, this trio of laments early in the setlist is not excessively sombre or morose. Toria’s humour and energy still shines through, as fine a tribute to A as the songs themselves.
Act II: Walpurgisnacht
“You’re all very quiet and lovely,” Toria teases as she tunes her acoustic guitar after ‘Sweet William’. The crowd chuckles warmly, before we’re treated to a tender version of ‘Mountains’. The mellow understanding of the song contrasts dynamically with the more determined, confrontational ‘Aleister’, an unreleased song which follows. Toria sings ‘Aleister’ with a ringing confidence, drawing some of the biggest applause of the night. It’s soon revealed there’s a reason for such brio.
“That’s actually the title track of a new album,” Toria says at song’s end, drawing further whoops from the crowd. “We’re getting the masters back tomorrow, so it’s very exciting.”
She tunes her guitar some more. “So I’m glad you all clapped,” she says in her hearty Bolton accent, laughing. “Cos if you hadn’t have done, I’d be fucked!”
We’re treated to another unreleased song, one we can now say will be an album track on Aleister. ‘Black Shuck’ is a short and sweet ‘interlude’ about ‘the Demon Dog of East Anglia’, and at its end someone shouts “East Anglia, woo!”
“Did you just say, ‘East Anglia, woo’?” Toria asks, looking out into the crowd with a smile. “Is that what you said?”
There’s a quick “yeah” fired back across the hall.
“This is such an ego strut for me,” Toria laughs. “I thought you just went, ‘Toria – Wooooff!”
The crowd laughs too, as Toria’s disarming personality succeeds once again in winning over a sizeable crowd. She rather harshly labels it part of her “schtick” when she introduces the next song, the stalwart ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’, with her usual plea to be told some local ghost stories, but it’s a not-insignificant part of her live charm, which has kept the many fans in Toria Wooff t-shirts coming back for more. A lot of musicians, including some famous ones, prove inhibited under stagelights, but Toria’s gregariousness helps make a crowd feel like a community. It also serves as a lively counterbalance to the often delicate and thoughtful songwriting.
Indeed, they must put something in the water in Bolton, for tonight’s opener Janileigh Cohen provides a similar charm for her short set. Another Boltonian – “talking to Toria before the show was like talking to myself”, she says – Jani also spins some humour and goodwill into the crowd, whether that’s in baldly stating her song ‘Small Things’ was inspired by being pooed on by a pigeon while busking in Manchester, or her banter with Lucas Bernard, her partner both on stage and off, in between songs.
Janileigh and Lucas have relied solely on harmonies and a pair of acoustic guitars to deliver her set, but she’s succeeded in showing us that Toria’s not the only talented Bolton folk singer around. ‘As a Child’, ‘Leave No One Behind’ and the afore-mentioned ‘Small Things’ are stand-outs on the night, while in the days that follow I find her closing song, a wistful cover of ‘Green Green Rocky Road’, is stuck in my head. All of her songs are welcome to stay there.
Act III: Fun and James
As for Toria, she follows ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’ with ‘The Flood’, a song which benefits from the deluge of sound her band is able to bring, both in the various instruments brought to bear and the harmonies from Danny and Polly.
“I’m very excited for you all to hear the studio recordings,” Toria says, introducing another song that will be on the new album, although she concedes it’s one that’s been part of her set for a while.
“I’m doing them with James, who’s somewhere around here.” Her eyes scan the dark hall for James Wyatt, her partner and producer of her albums.
James could perhaps fill in as The Toria Wooff Band’s missing drummer, for his timing is perfect: he’s been at the bar and unwittingly chooses this moment to re-enter through the door at the back of the hall. “Oh, he’s literally just come in the door as well!” Toria laughs.
James raises his arms high at the mention of his name, a pint of beer in each hand.
“Double-fisted, two pints as well – what a ledge!” Toria says, beaming with Lancashire pride. “Anyway, this one’s called ‘House on the Hill’.”
‘House on the Hill’ is destined to become one of Toria Wooff’s signature songs; a high, haunting folk lament inspired by Susan Hill’s Gothic novel The Woman in Black. In this way it’s a sort of spiritual successor to Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, evoking the desolate chill of Hill’s Eel Marsh House while stirring the audience with Toria’s high singing on the chorus. While Toria doesn’t mention Hill’s novel tonight – she usually does when introducing this song – so successful is she in evoking its tone that she embodies, each time she sings it, the Woman in Black herself.
It’s the final unreleased song of the night; from here on out, Toria relies on the tried-and-true to bring us down from the hill and lead us home. There’s something to be said for Toria keeping her powder dry, ready to ignite for a new album tour that’s hopefully not too far in the future. But it does mean I’ll have to wait, most likely until Aleister‘s release, to hear some of the other excellent songs I’ve heard at previous gigs (‘Good Mother’, ‘The Bargain’, ‘The Morrigan’, ‘Battering Ram’). But in ‘House on the Hill’ it’s fair to say I’ve likely heard that album’s magnificent centrepiece.
“Have we got any Townes Van Zandt fans?” Toria says, and there are some whoops from the crowd.
“Nice! Lovely…” Toria responds. “I’m not doing a cover, sorry! That really sounded like I was gearing you up for that.”
Instead, Toria gears up her next song with a thoughtful take on how the song was written. It proves to be the most revealing assessment of her own art and inspiration I’ve yet heard from this talented young songwriter.
“I imagine a lot of you are creatives as well,” Toria says to the audience. “When something big happens in life… a lot of your creative energy just goes straight into that thing.
“I wrote a lot of songs about this one person. And for lack of a better word, I was getting tired of writing the same stuff over and over again. So I wrote this song about ‘Pancho and Lefty’ [the Townes Van Zandt song].
“So for those of you who don’t know, they’re kinda like a package deal. Bandits. And the story goes that Lefty throws Pancho under the bus, gives him over to the Feds. And then Lefty gets off with a deal.
“You can interpret it different ways, but I decided to write a song that was from Lefty’s point of view, after he sat in the motel by himself. He’s thinking: ‘This has been my partner-in-crime for the whole of my life.’
“So anyway, I wrote this song and James came home and I was like, ‘Oh my god, James, I’ve written a song for the first time that’s not about this person. How amazing is that?’
“And then I played it and James was like, ‘uhhhhh… I think that might just be about the same thing.’
The crowd laughs. “So yeah,” Toria says, “I guess this is a song about survivor’s guilt.”
For its part, ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’, which Toria leads the band into now, would be an impressive song even if it were solely a reinterpretation of Van Zandt’s story of the bandit duo. But to fashion it in her own artistic image, embracing her own thoughts and emotions and experience into the creation of the song, even if unconsciously, is the signature of true songwriting. To carry it off with humour too, in the telling, is commendable; the warm laughter that accompanies Toria’s introduction around the room feels in no way inappropriate to the sad memory that inspired it. Alicia might remain “that person” tonight, but Toria has previously addressed this loss directly, not least at that remarkable Christmas concert. There’s no obligation for her to bare her wounds every night for her fans, nor pin a Sweet William to her breast as a sort of pointed clue to the Woman in Black’s sorrow. There’s music to be made.
Toria follows ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’ with the sweet and simple ‘That’s What Falling in Love Will Do’, thanking the audience once again “for being so quiet and lovely”. The band stay seated, trapping Toria on the stage as the audience claps and presses for an encore.
Toria obliges, picking up her guitar again for ‘The Plough’ and a soaring, inspirational ‘See Things Through’, before ending with the gentle flow of ‘Estuaries’. For the latter, Danny and DBH sit back and the familiar live duo of Toria and Polly are given the honour of ending the night.
Contrary to the lyrics of ‘Estuaries’, I leave without saying goodbye. There’s a buzz of activity after the concert ends, and Toria proves as popular at the merch stand as she has been up on the stage. There would be nothing for me to say anyway, other than to congratulate her on yet another impressive night of music.
I’m now wise to my satnav’s schemes, and ignore its attempt to direct me back through the dark moors. I have no desire to meet whatever ghosts Toria’s haunting music may have stirred out there amidst the pale gorse. I head home to Manchester pretty much as the crow flies, the waxing crescent moon staying determinedly high on my right. Only Toria Wooff, still up there on the hill signing vinyl and greeting fans, stands higher.
Setlist:
(all songs from the album Toria Wooff and written by Toria Wooff, unless noted)
- Noiselessly (unreleased)
- Song for A
- Sweet William
- Mountains
- Aleister (unreleased)
- Black Shuck (unreleased)
- The Waltz of Winter Hey
- The Flood
- House on the Hill (unreleased)
- Lefty’s Motel Room
- That’s What Falling in Love Will Do
- Encore: The Plough
- Encore: See Things Through
- Encore: Estuaries
My other concert reviews can be found here.
My fiction writing can be found here.
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