Thursday 26th June 2025

St. Pancras Old Church, London, England

The Old Church at St. Pancras is one of those places that has managed to retain its unearthliness. Only a short walk from the metropolitan bustle of St. Pancras, King’s Cross and Euston Station, a walk I have myself made on this warm summer evening, one can step through the iron gates of its gardens into a gentler world. Flowers pink and red greet you on the path. Beneath a blue sky, a restful golden shivelight comes through the tall trees, which whisper in the light breeze. It doesn’t register that a busy London railroad runs mere metres behind the church. One can even imagine that its trains slow to a silent crawl not because they must safely enter the station, but instead out of muted deference to the ancient churchyard.

All of which is to say that the Old Church is an apt setting for my latest pilgrimage to hear Kassi Valazza sing. I have been blessed to hear her unique sound, a resonant mix of folk, country and psychedelic rock, with a tone both pensive and bold, in a variety of scenes. I have heard her music rise profoundly in a bakery in York, a church in Staffordshire and the more identifiable setting of a first-floor bar-room in Manchester, my hometown, and on each occasion they have been among the finest musical experiences of my life. When it was announced that Kassi would have only two dates on the UK leg of her tour supporting her new album, From Newman Street, both in London, the only question was not whether I would make the journey down from the North, but whether I would attend both days. In the event the Turnpike Troubadours make the decision for me, and I spend the first night of Kassi’s two-day residency listening to the Oklahomans kick up a storm in Manchester.

But nothing could keep me from attending the second day. Nor am I the only pilgrim here – I recognise a few familiar faces among those who have arrived. I admire the stone façade of the church, recognising it from the Beatles’ ‘Mad Day Out’, a photo shoot during the making of the White Album in 1968. In the church gardens, a woman throws a stick for her small terrier, which yaps happily as it runs. Lewi Longmire, Kassi’s bandmate, emerges from a door in the transept of the church and takes a stroll along the path. Kassi herself steps out and walks freely in the grass, as the Beatles did before her.

The trees are not the only things that whisper. Tonight’s opening act, the young Sam Wilkinson, sits on a bench with his bandmates and talks. Just a few short years ago, he was a kid competing on a reality TV show called The Voice, a fact that makes me feel devastatingly old, older than this church. But when he takes the stage later tonight there is a commendable maturity to his songs. Backed by Aleks Dimitrova on stand-up bass, he runs through a six-strong set with his twelve-string guitar, joking with the audience about “the man upstairs” – “Simon, on sound” – before ‘Why I Live in a Bungalow’. He invites his friends, Connie and Martha, to harmonise with him. He ends with his best in ‘By My Own Design’, which showcases not only his own soulful vocals but those of his companions.

When Kassi Valazza takes the stage in the chancel of the Old Church, this mere audience becomes a congregation. When she emerges it is as a sort of woodland deity, barefoot, dressed in green, the folkish flaxen hair I have become used to seeing now returned to a natural brown and bedight with pearls. She turns her green eyes on the audience and, at this site of pilgrimage, begins to sing.

We sit in the nave of the church – at the back, the latecomers stand – as Kassi’s clarion voice and insistent strumming carries us through ‘Better Highways’. “Some bright day, the right ones will find you,” she affirms. It’s followed by ‘Birds Fly’, always an excellent song to hear live as its mantra-like strumming soaks the atmosphere of the room.

Having had the good fortune of hearing music from a chapel place a number of times, whether that is the score of Interstellar booming regally from the organ of Blackburn Cathedral, the divergent songs of Sturgill Simpson and Oliver Anthony from the wooden pews of the Manchester Albert Hall – a former Wesleyan church converted into a modern venue – or Kassi herself from the rapturous stone of St Lawrence’s Church in Staffordshire, I have come to recognise the bittersweet ambience of these places on such nights, these hand-me-down temples of more devout generations now turned over to the nightly worship of secular artists. On each occasion, the initial worrying sense of sacrilege is quickly overcome, as the notes and the voices resound from the walls, and the secular show they are not mere commonplace intruders. They are inheritors of the same magic, and in their own way they honour these scattered temples with their creativity. When Kassi sings “watch the sky break open, see her run”, in the magnificent ‘Watching Planes Go By’, it’s a vivid lyricism worthy of the most sacred places. That raincloud never even thought to burst until Kassi found it.

And Kassi is not alone in bringing forth the magic of the night. On the previous occasions I’ve seen her live in England, she’s been in a trio with Lewi Longmire on electric guitar and Tobias Berblinger on keys. Tonight, she heads a more conventional band of four. Tobias is absent, but Lewi Longmire remains, though he has switched to bass – and harmonica, which soars cathartically on ‘Room in the City’. Replacing him on guitar duties is Adam Witkowski, from Nashville – “you can tell because of the hat,” Kassi says – while Ned Folkerth mans the drums. He will also add a series of bells and percussive sounds to Kassi’s soundscape – including, on ‘Your Heart’s a Tin Box’, some bongos worthy of a Paul Simon song.

They are also joined, unfortunately, by a few minor technical gremlins who have strayed onto this hallowed ground. One haunts a speaker and refuses to be banished, adding a buzz here and there throughout the night. Kassi’s mike also goes dead for one verse of ‘Rapture’ – “one of those nightmares you have a billion times, if you’re a performer,” she says – so she sings it again. But such things don’t affect the quality of the music, or our enjoyment of it. ‘Rapture’ earns one of the biggest roars of applause of the night.

Kassi and her band follow ‘Rapture’ with ‘Johnny Dear’. Lewi smiles at Adam as he performs the guitar soloes and flourishes which he would normally provide. Adam’s lines are more conventional than the ones on the album version of the track, but he announces himself, appropriately enough, on ‘Welcome Song’. An unexpectedly heavy and dirty guitar break causes ripples of goosebumps, and the confidence of his sound grows not only through the rest of the song but the rest of the night.

It’s a good thing, too, because Kassi’s music is not all folk and lyricism. Alongside the quietly weeping guitar on ‘Weight of the Wheel’, which fills in well for the pedal steel of the album cut, Adam’s guitar also meets the challenge of Kassi’s occasional rock freakouts. ‘Early Morning Rising’ is the first real taste of this, as the band crash and roam like the finest of Sixties psychedelia, but it is particularly potent in tonight’s encore. ‘Chino’ is tailor-made for such a freakout, Kassi smiling with pleasure as she strums and sways and watches Adam cook on the guitar. ‘Matty Groves’, the Fairport Convention cover which ends tonight’s set, is also a delicious treat in this vein, transporting us to a time when every band – quite rightly – wanted to sound like this.

Lewi Longmire, with his bass and harmonica and his occasional harmonies, is hardly a forgotten man – at least, not for most. Shortly before the encore, a bloke from the back of the room shouts “Who’s the bass player? You haven’t introduced him.” Lewi looks bemused.

“I did!” Kassi says, snuffing out the heckler’s gaslight. And she did – after ‘Welcome Song’, in fact. “Who the hell are you?” she says, to laughter. “You clearly haven’t been here the whole time!” she adds playfully. “That is embarrassing.”

In the same part of the show she introduced Lewi to all but one of the audience, Kassi had elaborated on some of the realities of touring. The lyrics of ‘Your Heart’s a Tin Box’ hints at this – “Two months of selling out most of the shows, I’d sure like to see where all that money goes” – but Kassi mentions how merchandise is “the only way that artists make money any more”, like popcorn at a movie theatre. So… “please buy our stuff,” she deadpans.

Later, recalling the ‘lady truck driver’ friend who inspired ‘Canyon Lines’, she mentions how “if this job didn’t work out, that’s probably what I’d do… It’s the same thing, really. Just drive around, a lot of stuff to sell.” The audience laughs, and Kassi speaks lightly and without complaint, but there is a reality behind the laughter. Even successful artists seem to be on the brink nowadays, for various reasons. And if Kassi were more famous – as famous as her talent deserves – it would likely still be tough financially. That, shamefully, is the lot of artists in our society. It is how we treat the best and most unique among us.

It is something I find myself thinking about later that night, as I walk back to my hotel, and the following day as the train wends me home. When I return to work, a safe but unexciting office job in I.T., I know I will be expected to make a decision on a promotion offer that is waiting for me. I have my own minor creative outlets, having published a novel I am proud of and receiving praise from one of my favourite writers for a story I wrote, but I know there’s no future in which I could devote the majority of my time to it. There never was such a future, and I have made my peace with the same pact so many of us make, the commitments that bind us ever closer to a duller life in which we sell our time for money and for security – and for less of both, nowadays.

And it makes it all the more important that there are those like Kassi Valazza who continue on, whose merch sales may only take them to the next gig rather than to a stable future, but who, in making the commitment to the musical life and pay the price of insecurity it brings, remain, until the end of their days, creatively free.

And it’s a freedom that not only gives them the opportunity to express themselves artistically, to write and record songs as astonishing as ‘Watching Planes Go By’ – and have people astonished by them – but to play them in venues as special as the Old Church at St Pancras. “We’re feeling very lucky we get to play two nights in this beautiful place,” Kassi had said earlier in the night.

And there is a moment towards the end of the show, as her band leaves the stage and she stands alone with her guitar and picks her way through ‘From Newman Street’, that stands as one of those moments of life which seem right, and more right than mortgages, more right than bills paid on time or career promotions or the other daily chains whose jangling we never seem to hear.

As Kassi Valazza stands barefoot and plays her soft, restful song, outside in the dark the church bells gently toll for ten o’ the clock. ‘From Newman Street’ has one of those timeless guitar lines that immediately resonates and feels, in the best way, like you’ve heard it before. It’s a melody the universe must recognise, for the church bells seem to toll almost in time with Kassi’s voice. In this beautiful place, she is free and there is nothing else that compares.

Setlist:

(all songs from the album From Newman Street and written by Kassi Valazza, unless noted)

  1. Better Highways
  2. Birds Fly
  3. Room in the City (from Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing)
  4. Small Things
  5. Watching Planes Go By (from Knows Nothing)
  6. Roll On
  7. Rapture (from Knows Nothing)
  8. Johnny Dear (from Dear Dead Days)
  9. Welcome Song (from Knows Nothing)
  10. Your Heart’s a Tin Box
  11. Early Morning Rising (single)
  12. Song for a Season (from Knows Nothing)
  13. Canyon Lines (from Knows Nothing)
  14. Weight of the Wheel
  15. From Newman Street
  16. Encore: Chino (from Dear Dead Days)
  17. Encore: Matty Groves (Traditional) (unreleased)

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My fiction writing can be found here.