The last day of November. The last evening of MoorsholmLive! for 2007. The New Rope String Band at Moorsholm Memorial Hall.

It’s a tricky one. My father-in-law turned to me in the interval this evening and muttered in my ear: “How on earth do you describe that to people who haven’t seen it?”

And there’s the rub. I’ve got to try to convey the enthusiasm, the humour, the madcap tomfoolery and the sheer exuberant musicianship that comprises the New Rope String Band. In a few hundred words.

Impossible? Quite possibly. But I’ll give it a go.

Now, in terms of the acts we’ve already seen at MoorsholmLive this year, the thought of a man in slicked down hair and dungarees on fiddle accompanying a bespectacled accordion-playing kilted Scot, a ponytailed fiddler/polymath and a Dutch lady with a stern expression is one that doesn’t quite fit into the scheme of things.

How wrong you can be.

Launching immediately into a frenzied fiddle/accordion musical maelstrom, The New Rope String Band grab hold of the audience and plainly refuse to let them go for the next few hours, assaulting all the senses with their knockabout bluegrass percussion-driven musical nonsense.

Defying genres, defying pigeonholes and defying all conventions of music, The New Rope String band ceaselessly move between audience-based banter, musical genius and plain old slapstick humour to weave a rich aural tapestry laced thickly with a strong undercurrent of visual gags.

Strong four-part harmonies lend a cohesive edge to the general mayhem of a fact-led song containing such gems as “February 1865 is the only month that never had a full moon” and “Jews can lick Israeli stamps because they have kosher glue”. How can you fail to chuckle at a band with lyrics such as those?

Next up we witness a bluegrass piece for fiddle and guitar. This leaves the kilted accordion player at a bit of a loose end so he decides to entertain the packed Memorial Hall audience by drinking the contents of his flask, eating a boiled egg and having a shave whilst his bandmates create musical merriment behind him. This starts the laughter and it doesn’t end for quite some time.

Bringing a whole new aspect to run-of-the-mill elastic bands, the accordion player and second fiddler grab the attention with the aid of nose whistles; classic TV theme tunes such as EastEnders and Mr Benn earn the audience lollipops for correctly identifying a particular example of theme tune trivia.

But it’s not only with instruments regarded as the status quo that The New Rope String Band can reign supreme. Next up, they take a range of beer bottles and, under the guise of toasting the audience, the talented quartet end up jamming on a percussion-laden bottle-led Cuban revolutionary anthem.

It’s bizarre. It’s unusual. It’s a total visual and aural overload. It’s The New Rope String Band.

As a curtain-dropper for the first half, second fiddle brings out a hideous contraption created from several thousand zipties, a pair of aluminium stepladders and several hundred feet of what appears to be polypropylene piping. The rest of the band take shorter pieces of pipe and indulge in a percussive moment of genius. Like the Kodo Drummers of Japan, The New Rope String Band use off-beat alternative rhythms to create a simple yet so, so effective and almost hypnotic syncopated beat which leads us nicely into the interval. A confetti mortar shocks the table at the front of the hall and the break is upon us.

Stunned and still chucking from what we’ve seen, the sell-out audience can only anticipate the second half, not quite sure of what we’re going to see after The Raffle.

The second half does not disappoint.

Time flies, songs blur into one another: fragments of French (complete with enormo-subtitles on flash cards); a bursting accordion full of feathers; an inspired session where the black backdrop is lifted to reveal a gigantic musical stave, complete with human faces for notes; reels and jigs with various incredible capers on the stage and a moment of Laurel and Hardy-esque/Blues Brothers visual humour at the end where another bluegrass tune gives way to manic comedy through the use of huge-bulbed horns.

The New Rope String Band. Words cannot even begin to do them justice. It’s something that has to be experienced, not read about. The photos accompanying this review will do little to convey the sheer Alice In Wonderland craziness of the live show. Put bluntly, if you weren’t at the Memorial Hall tonight, you missed THE greatest show yet put on as part of the MoorsholmLive! season.

If The New Rope String Band are playing near you in the future, go and see them. You will not be disappointed. The only complaint is that the evening couldn’t go on long enough.

Utterly fantastic.

Richard Beadnall