Woodman Folk Club, Kingswinford, 21st February 2025
Mauerwerk, Herrenberg, Germany, 31st October 2024
Gäubote from 2nd November 2024 (German original below!)
Harmony and British-Swabian charm
Herrenberg: The folk duo Paul Walker & Karen Pfeiffer delighted their fans with a successful feel-good concert with a living room atmosphere in the Mauerwerk.
By Jutta Krause
It is not the songs that the duo presented to the Herrenberg audience, although they were interpreted in an extremely professional, melodious and radiant manner. Nor is the open, friendly manner of the two, their warm interaction with the audience, the concentrated load of British-Swabian charm that the two exude, or the harmonious chemistry between them, which is not only expressed in harmony in terms of sound, in themselves an explanation for the effect that Paul Walker and Karen Pfeiffer have when making music. Rather, it is the sum of all of this and a lot more that made the concert on Thursday evening in the Mauerwerk an all-round successful experience for the audience. At their third concert in Herrenberg, they had a colourful mix of their own and other people's, old and new songs and ballads in store for their growing fan base and performed them with so much joy that it was infectious. From the first song onwards - the dreamy "Love is a place I dream of" by Luka Bloom - the audience was completely captivated by the music.
With the warm, woody tones of an Irish flute, Pfeiffer's deep, soulful voice and Walker's gentle guitar accompaniment, they made this love song swing and created a warm, atmospheric ambience that lasted throughout the entire evening. The next two pieces were also dreamy: "Goethe's Song" - a bilingual adaptation of Goethe's poem "Nähe des Geliebten" - and "The Rose of Coburg Street" by Jimmy Crowley, in which an old woman looks back on her youth in Cork. From there, with a song written by the duo themselves, the tour continued on to Scotland. “Dalgety Bay” with its wonderful view over the Firth of Forth to Edinburgh forms the backdrop for disappointed love and heartache in this classic folk piece. The two also had other themes in their musical repertoire - such as “Our Golden Age”, a swan song for the obsolete industries in Walker's hometown of Stoke-on-Trent in the [middle] of England, which was performed with great audience participation, or the touching “What If My Pockets Were Empty?”, which deals with impending and actual homelessness.
In “The Rejected Songwriter's Club” they chatted wittily and rousingly about their personal lives, pondered the meaning of life in view of the hyphen between the day of birth and the day of death [in ‘Down to Numbers’], and even invented a new verse for “The Ballad of the Queen of May”, which gives the gruesome story in which the “Queen of May” comes to a sad end a happy ending instead - with a lot of help from the willing audience.
Karen Pfeiffer accompanied many of the pieces with woodwind sounds - she had brought a whole arsenal with her and had the right instrument for every piece, from [bass] to alto to tenor recorder [and Irish flute]. All of that would have been enjoyment enough, but the duo brought other facets into play with demanding pieces such as the - superbly interpreted - "Diamonds and Rust" by Joan Baez, Cole Porter's equally outstanding, goosebump-inducing "Miss Otis Regrets" and Hannes Wader's "Die Mine", which gave the concert more depth. It is hardly surprising that the audience was far from satisfied after the officially last piece, "Auf Wiedersehen, Me Duck". The encores turned into a request concert: Karen Pfeiffer & Paul Walker simply played all the pieces the audience wanted. Until Karen Pfeiffer descended to the audience during "La Vie en Rose", opened the doors to the outside with the last chords and thus ended the concert.
The Harrison, Kings Cross, London, November 2023
Paul Walker & Karen Pfeiffer
Venue: The Harrison - Town: London - Date: 03/11/2023 - Author: Pete Bradley
Although I've seen Karen before in her trio Michell, Pfeiffer and Kulesh, this was the first time that I've seen Paul and Karen play as a duo, but it very definitely will not be the last. (… we have cut out some text here that was not directly related to our concert, if you would like to read the whole review, please find it here: https://www.fatea-records.co.uk/magazine/live/pw-kp-harrison/)
… get to spend an evening with such glorious company as Paul Walker and Karen Pfeiffer.
Having heard (and reviewed on Fatea) Paul and Karen's album "Auf Weidersehen Me Duck", I was aware
how beautiful their voices are. I was not aware, though, how wonderfully animated they are on stage. Karen sings with her whole body. Particularly noticeable in their cover of Joan Baez's "Diamonds and Rust", in which the entire stage isn't large enough to contain her and she even bounced out into the audience. During the line 'heading straight for a fall' she dropped into a seat and sat down amongst us for a while. Particularly also noticeable in "Our Golden Age", their homage to Stoke-on-Trent's industrial past. When she sings 'Round and round goes the potters wheel', her arms helicopter round her, driven by the ghost of a long gone potter's workbench. I'd swear at one instance, when she is describing the brick-like fist of a miner, her body is inhabited momentarily by the spirit of a body builder.
I was also surprised how much fun they have not just playing their songs, but playing with their songs. Their material can be dark, tragic, deep, poignant, but there is an air of lightheartedness about them. When an actor breaks the flow of a play and talks to the audience directly they call that breaking the fourth wall. Karen and Paul are masters at this. During "Rejected Songwriters' Club", Paul announced, that on the album there is a violin solo from Ciaran Algar, but that Karen would now emulate that. Karen, whilst still juggling with the maracas and Tibetan cymbals that she was already playing, suddenly brings out a weird instrument, part kazoo and part trombone, which as you can imagine sounds nothing like a violin. During their murder ballad, "The Ballad Of The Queen Of The May", after the gruesome murder scene, they broke stride whilst still strumming the chords to announce that they had written a less gruesome ending which required some audience participation to shout 'Aileen, duck. She's behind you!' in the style of a pantomime, and then proceeded to replay the last verse, but with a happy ending thanks to the audience intervention. I have never seen any one do anything like that before. Amazing.
They are also wonderfully self effacing. After playing "Rejected Songwriters' Club", Paul said that the music press had compared his guitar solo with Ralph McTell. He then joked that they had said 'compared to Ralph McTell, he's crap'.
A young lady arrived late in the first half and sat next to a guy in the front row. When they were about to start the second half that couple were still upstairs at the bar and hadn't yet returned to their seats. Paul joked that he didn't think they were coming back and that the guy must have texted his partner to say 'Get me out of here.' Of course they returned. The show was far too good for anyone to want to leave.
Their 2018 album "The Whole Charade" is bookended by "The Lark In The Clear Air". They opened their first set with a crystal clear a capela rendition of this from Karen, which then morphed into "Where I Live", a love song written by Paul from "Auf Weidersehen Me Duck". This was followed by a cover of Colum Sand's "Goethe's Song" which Colum based on "Nähe des Geliebten", a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Partly in English and partly in the original German, the song is ideal for them, Karen having come from a wine growing region in Germany, and Paul having come from Stoke-on-Trent - a wine consuming region.
Paul and Karen recently played at the Cork Folk festival where they met Jimmy Crowley, who played a song he co wrote with Pat Daly, called "The Rose Of Coburg Street". The lyrics mentioned a saxophone, so the song caught Karen's ear as she was attempting to learn to play that instrument to add to the long list of other wind instruments that she plays. Instead of a saxophone she had brought along an instrument she referred to as a Hoover. I think it is a bass recorder as I believe a contrabass recorder would be even larger.
This was followed by four tracks from their latest album, "Rejected Songwriters' Club", "Our Golden Age", my favorite track on the album "Down To Numbers" and their cover of John Spillane's "Under That Old Clare Moon". They rounded off the first set with a song that I don't think has yet appeared on an album, "The Oatcake Song" - a sing-a-long song that must have confused the Minnesotans in the audience, as it was written in the Stoke dialect.
For the second set they continued with four further tracks from "Auf Weidesehen Me Duck": "Die Moorsoldaten", smuggled out of a German concentration camp in the 1930's which was translated to "Peat Bog Soldiers" and is now an international peace song (likely to be found in any Michell, Pfeiffer and Kulesh set list); their cover of "Diamonds and Rust"; "The Ballad of The Queen Of May" and "What If My Pockets Were Empty", a song in which they imagine that they were homeless, inspired by the Shelter statistic that there are four million people in the UK that are only one pay check away from homelessness.
Maybe due to the fact that The Beatles had just released a new single, or maybe because they were playing at The Harrison, but they included a Beatles cover in their set list, namely George Harrison's "Here Comes The Sun". This was followed by "Play Me A Love Song", inspired, apparently, by a nightclub they visisted in Cologne. "Play Me A Love Song" is included on their 2018 album "The Whole Charade" and on their 2013 album "One By One".
The evening was wrapped up with the title track from "Auf Weidersehen Me Duck". It was inspired after playing at a folk festival when someone called out to Paul, 'See you in a field somewhere, Paul.' It includes a list on names which end in Pete, at which point Karen pointed at me, and winked. I mean, considering this was the first time I'd seen the duo play, what an honour!
The only downside to the evening was that there wasn't a great many people there in the audience. I guess playing your first London gig on a night in which the Royal Festival Hall were holding a Bert Jansch tribute and on a night so close to Bonfire Night was maybe not advisable. Their bookings continue throught 2024 and include venues all over the country, so I urge you to make sure that you check their website and get to see them. You do not want to miss them again, particularly if the venues are under so much threat.
Set List
The Lark In The Clear Air/ Where I Live
Goethe's Song
The Rose Of Coburg Street
Rejected Songwriters' Club
Our Golden Age
Down To Numbers
Under That Old Clare Moon
The Oatcake Song
Peat Bog Soldiers/ Die Moorsoldaten
Diamonds And Rust
The Ballad Of The Queen Of May
What If My Pockets Were Empty?
Here Comes The Sun
Play Me A Love Song
Auf Wiedersehen Me Duck
Pete Bradley
Link to the Original review: https://www.fatea-records.co.uk/magazine/live/pw-kp-harrison/
Bedworth Folk Club, December 2022
“Well, what can I say but WOW!! ... you had the audience in the palms of your hands last night, mesmerised by the beauty of your harmonies and the emotions radiating from your songs..... On behalf of Tamworth Folk Club may I thank you so very much for coming to our 'humble abode' last night – we so enjoyed you.” - Malcolm Robinson
— Tamworth Folk Club, November 2022
Aberdeen Folk Club, November 2022
Woodman Folk Club, Kingswinford, October 2022
Read Woody & Co.'s detailed review of the night here: http://www.woodmanfolk.co.uk/rev_h-walkerpfeiffer_1022.html