Saturday 26th July 2025
The Nordic Church, Liverpool, England
I’ve been blessed to experience many fine concerts, from stadia hosting legends such as Paul McCartney and Nick Cave to the likes of Kassi Valazza singing a Neil Young song in a bakery in York or her own remarkable songbook in churches of her own. But no concert has been so unique as this warm, bright Saturday evening in Liverpool, hearing Toria Wooff’s voice soar in the Nordic Church.
The Gustav Adolfs Kyrka is an impressive sight as you approach. It is a Swedish stave church, a rarity outside Scandinavia, though built out of familiar British redbrick. While its tall greyed spire is dwarfed by the more recent tower-block developments that encroach upon it along Liverpool’s waterfront, the church dominates the sky and steals the heart in a way those more soulless buildings never could.
By English standards the church is young; built in 1884 for itinerant Norse sailors and emigrants on their way to America, you enter under the black-and-gold sign that names this ‘Skandinaviska sjömanskyrkan’ (Scandinavian Seaman’s Church) and walk up two flights of narrow stairs to enter the nave. Unlike the conventional rectangular shape found in a typical English church, the nave of the Nordic Church is an eye-catching octagonal lantern shape. Bride-white walls host Gothic lancet windows through which the sun pours as I take my seat on an empty pew in the front row. I gaze up at the roof high above. More learned eyes than mine would be able to draw out the nuances of the kyrka‘s architecture, but I know enough to recognise the Gothic Revival elements both inside and outside the church.
This, perhaps, is why Toria Wooff has chosen the venue to host her night of music. Wearing a long black dress and black boots to match her jet-black hair, this self-professed Goth is undergoing a Gothic Revival of her own. In March she released her self-titled debut album, a powerful, nuanced collection of self-penned folk songs with tasteful touches of country and Americana. In May I saw her live in a packed basement in Manchester as part of her successful album tour and, after tonight, I will surely see her again in the autumn, for she reveals to the audience in the Nordic Church that she will be touring again in October. In the meantime, she is busy recording and tracking her next album with James Wyatt, her partner and producer, and we’re treated to five unreleased songs in the setlist tonight.
There’s no opening act; instead, Toria performs two sets with an intermission, during which she mingles with the audience. She does not perform alone: as on her earlier album tour, Toria’s voice and acoustic guitar are supported by Polly Virr, who seats the endpin of her cello into a strap extending from the leg of her chair. Unlike in Manchester, where my view of Polly was obscured, tonight I’m able to not only hear but see her cello’s vibrato and tasteful glissandos complement Toria’s songs. The luxurious sound of the cello has never felt so essential.
Appropriately enough, the opening song in this singular church is ‘The Bargain’, an unreleased song that seems to be about a deal made with the devil (“he appeared in trusted clothes, cuffed and collared around his throat”) that also doubles brilliantly as a song about an independent woman who risks being ensnared by a controlling man (“the only thing I ask you to be: a doting mother, a wife to me”). It’s a fine introduction to Toria’s sound: a powerfully-sung, intelligent song with a timeless folk melody.
‘The Bargain’ is one that Toria has picked alone on her guitar, but Polly now joins for a flurry of songs from the album; ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’, ‘Song for A’ and ‘Sweet William’, her cello sounding particularly fine on the latter song. Toria then goes solo again for ‘Mountains’. This was one of the first songs of hers that really grabbed my attention, and while, like ‘Lefty’ before it, the subtle country touches of the recorded version are missing from the live duo of guitar and cello, it still resonates from the eight walls of the Nordic chamber.
Many artists are diminished by having their songs stripped back. Toria Wooff’s songs, by contrast, feel like they could bloom in arid desert. There’s a strength to her songwriting that allows for flexibility, and the songs work just as well on stage with Polly’s cello as they do with the more textured soundscape James Wyatt helps provide on vinyl. Quite by chance, and without fanfare, I have in the North of England stumbled across one of the more impressive young songwriters I’ve had the privilege to hear live. Toria proves it further with a series of unreleased songs to end her first set: ‘House on the Hill’, inspired by Susan Hill’s Gothic novel The Woman in Black, is a future fan-favourite, while ‘Good Mother’ showcases her gift for melody. The closer, ‘Battering Ram’, is one Toria says she has never played live before. Picked softly and sung gently as a folk song, it fits my above thesis about the songs’ flexibility to a tee: I could easily imagine it being recorded as heavy metal.
‘Battering Ram’ is met with applause – as, deservedly, has every song before it. In contrast to the gig I witnessed in the basement in Manchester a couple of months ago, where Toria told jokes and anecdotes to a heaving crowd, each round of applause tonight has been met with an almost shy thank-you from the lady at the mike.
It’s almost certainly due to the nature of the venue: a sacrosanct church with an audience lined in pews implicitly demands a more consciously demure approach than the rowdy crowd who backed into that dark Manchester basement. Certainly, during the intermission Toria is as bright and outgoing as ever.
She greets me with a hug and is pleased I came; she had placed me on the guest list tonight as a token of gratitude for purchasing one of her canvases recently. (She’s a talented painter as well as a singer-songwriter. As for me, it feels good to be an art patron, like I’m a 16th-century Italian count.) Toria signs a concert poster for me, as does James. (“Some people care about the producer,” he teases her.) She glides around the room and smiles and chats, offering her attention to anyone who wishes for it. As I return to the front row, a corgi pokes its nose out from under the pew, roaming around in search of pats and rubs. It’s a good night.
As Toria and Polly return to the stage for their second set, the stagelights brighten due to the slowly failing light outside. Perhaps inspired by the intermission’s canine concierge, Toria opens with ‘Black Shuck’, which she says is about “the demon dog of East Anglia… and what the dog did in a church in the 1500s”. I check under my pew to make sure the corgi hasn’t also been doing things in a church. Jokes aside, ‘Black Shuck’ is a fine song, as yet unreleased, with another bona fide English folk melody from Toria.
Now comes ‘The Flood’, a highlight of the night as it looks like both Toria and Polly particularly enjoy playing this one. The picking required on Toria’s guitar seems to energise her, as do the opportunities the song gives her voice to wail and soar. Polly is given her head too, weaving some cool vibrato flourishes into the performance. After the song ends, Toria is full of praise for Polly Virr from the mike. “She’s so good that in the set before, I actually played a song in the wrong key and didn’t know, and she just ran with it. So that’s why I keep her around.”
To reciprocate, Polly is moved to provide some of the most gorgeous cello sounds of the night, joining Toria’s voice in flight as the two soar on ‘Author Song’ and giving a cinematic through-line to ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’. The latter is a real testament to Toria’s verisimilitude; she loves ghost stories, she says, and there’s not enough of them in Lancashire, so she decided to make her own. In her poet’s hands, this non-descript street of shopfronts in her hometown of Horwich (there’s an Aldi at one end of Winter Hey Lane, a nail parlour at the other) becomes a potent and foreboding place plagued by jealousy and the returning dead.
After another song, the sweet and simple palate-cleanser ‘That’s What Falling in Love Will Do’, Toria thanks the venue promoters, Mike Phoenix and Jon Edwards, for making the night happen (“they have such a good ethos with musicians”). At the end of the show, they will hold a raffle and hand out chocolates and wine to the winners, but in truth we’re all winners tonight. The venue, the seating, the audience and, of course, the music, have all been top drawer. My own ethos is never to seek out an artist before or after the show unless it happens naturally, and tonight it happens naturally. At the end of the night, I get another hug from Toria after she signs my setlist – another welcome surprise, for usually these sheets are swiped by fans before the artists’ footsteps have even finished echoing from the stage. But I stand around at the front to see if anyone else wants to take it before I do. No one does, and a beaming Toria is only too happy to sign it for me.
But before that time comes, Toria and Polly are still on stage, and they are yet to provide their finest moment. ‘See Things Through’ starts with Toria alone on her guitar. About a minute in, Polly comes in with that rich and resonant cello sound we’ve been so blessed with tonight. It’s an excellent song, one of those that indisputably deserves a wider audience. It’s sung with both vulnerability and remarkable power by an almost transcendent Toria Wooff; that chiaroscuro effect this lady in black in a white church is able to capture so impressively.
The song builds to its epic finale, Toria’s voice and Polly’s strings soaring in unison and falling in release. The applause which has greeted every song’s end tonight bursts spontaneously into roars for an encore. The duo oblige, with a gentle and calming rendition of ‘Estuaries’ to end the night. They are presented with garlands of flowers by Mike and Jon, and I grin as a sheepish James Wyatt is also called to the stage to take a deserved round of applause for his role in this music.
“You leave without saying goodbye,” Toria sang in that final song, and as an invited guest I determine not to slip out quietly into the night as I normally do at concerts. Toria signs the setlist for me, as I mentioned, but I’m also moved to thank her for the invitation and promising that I’ll certainly be coming to many more nights like this to witness her talent. I’m able to thank Polly too, and we talk about the night in Manchester. James is in a back-room somewhere, so as Toria walks past I touch her gently on the arm and ask her to say goodbye to him for me. It feels silly as I do so, and yet also natural; the warm welcome they have extended to me makes this moment feel like one of those gatherings of friends where you part and know you will come again. I descend the stairs to the exit, where Mike and Jon shake the hands of those who leave. I walk down the road on a summer evening that, despite the efforts of tonight’s Gothic revival, refuses to truly darken.
Setlist:
(no opening act; two full sets with intermission after ‘Battering Ram’)
(all songs from the album Toria Wooff and written by Toria Wooff, unless noted)
- The Bargain (unreleased)
- Lefty’s Motel Room
- Song for A
- Sweet William
- Mountains
- House on the Hill (unreleased)
- Good Mother (unreleased)
- Battering Ram (unreleased) [End of Set #1]
- Black Shuck (unreleased)
- The Flood
- Author Song
- The Waltz of Winter Hey
- That’s What Falling in Love Will Do
- See Things Through
- Encore: Estuaries
My other concert reviews can be found here.
My fiction writing can be found here.
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