FAUN Live at the Islington Assembly Hall, London 2025

The queue snaking outside the Islington Assembly Hall could not have clued you in to the event inside. Between the pirate hats, thorn crowns and heavy metal T-shirts, were we headed into a folk metal gig? A fantasy tavern reenactment? Besides showcasing my musical taste range in outfit form, this was a a bit of everything, with a whole lot of magic cast.

Janice Burns and Jon Doran

The soft enveloping harmonies of instant favourites, Anglo-Scottish folk duo Janice Burns and Jon Doran, fill the room. With the sparse accompaniment of guitar, bouzouki and mandolin, their voices breathe fresh life into old songs from up and down the British isles. The way their voices stood side by side, never overpowering, only highlighting each other’s, you could have easily imagined them singing around a roaring hearth in 1850 or a village feast in 1487, especially with a lilting piece in Scots-Gaelic. Glittering, almost like a pebble skipping on the water, The Black Fox and The Old Churchyard lulled and swayed us, their stories unfolding gently.

They ended on a pair of songs reminding us of the importance of our natural areas, our connection to the land and our right to roam said lands, ever more endangered in England. Having, like Janice, grown up in a country with ample countryside to walk at leisure, I felt them most acutely. Our trails are proof of our humanity, just like this music has survived and morphed to reach us into the present day.

Ye Banished Privateers

If you’re into pirates, you couldn’t be more lucky: we live in an absolute golden age of sea shanties in the mainstream. While I was growing up, the best you could do on a very young Youtube was 15 Men on a Dead Men’s Chest and The Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack. These days, you have all flavours of the piracy spectrum: do you want theatrics or 18th century work songs? Do you want intimate acappella quartets or the power of a full choir? Do you want the Yarrrrs or the Yo-ho-hos?

Ye Banished Privateers is a four-course meal of dramatic performance, historical inspiration, on-stage banter and musical ribaldry. Yes, the sheer number of acoustic instruments on stage was eye-catching, but you gotta give it to the outfits first. Just like much of the crowd had chosen the pirate look as their escapist dress of choice, theirs were taken to the next level, with every variation on the Jack Sparrow aesthetic, made raggedy and charcoal-stained. Portraying a chaotic crew of pirates, the Swedish band proudly took us on a journey of their quests and conquests, as various members took over the mic to regale us with their stories.

Musically, they lean into musical theatre with dramatic recollections of how the crew formed “in a filthy old tavern in the port of Belfast”, the tragic story of Annabel and the comical story of a drunken convict in Rowing with One Hand. I personally greatly enjoyed Waves Away, off their latest studio album Till The Sea Shall Give Up Her Dead, as it allowed for the voices of the crowd to rise with that of frontwoman Magda Andersson, swelling full of heart and melancholy. Quite naturally, we didn’t wallow in it for long, as the band was bent on rioting. To Libertalia, chaos ensued: Magda sang on her belly on the floor her fellow crewmen danced across the stage, laughing and shoving. A violin bow was snapped and the pieces thrown into the crowd (and into the hands of my friend!). All the while, Ina Molin cheerfully drummed with a smile on her face. Good fun.

FAUN

Adaya and Laura breathe in. “Who are they in the deep green woods in the hidden bower? / Who awakes in the deep green woods in the midnight hour?” FAUN emerge as if they’d always been there, materialising from the shadows with the sinewy Belladonna. They are a Renaissance painting, draped in reds and purples. If synesthesia was a spyglass you could peak through, they look exactly as their music sounds.

Rediscovering FAUN in the lead-up to this concert has been nothing short of time travel. Their latest album HEX (reviewed here) became an instant classic, harkening back to the folk harmonies and soundscapes my musical attractions were moulded on, while also telling much needed stories of then and now and maybe what’s to come.

Live in London, the sunrise light of blissful childhood flooded in and worried thoughts went out the windows. In an instant, we were dancing.

Their preeminent invitation was one of submergence, suspension of disbelief in the swirling storm clouds of their song. Just like the witches and healing-women they chant about, they themselves are casting spells on us, through voice and lute and bagpipes, so that we are not in the same world as when we had arrived, that we have travelled, we are above it all and can look to see a new way of being. Like reading the weather in the movement of spiderwebs.

Newcomers may have landed here thanks to the wave of attention brought forth by the recent popularity of Viking mythology in mainstream media, but FAUN stands apart from those often-misrepresented waters through their lightness, their playful dance with story and melody. Take their hit song Walpurgisnacht: it loosened everybody’s limbs and from head banging to arms outstretched, the dancing of the witches was extended by our own, drumbeat by fast drumbeat. Far from fearful darkness, this was a song to grasp hands to and spin in wild laughing circles.

It’s a show full of delights. Stephan Groth gifts us a hurdy-gurdy solo, made to sound almost like an experimental electric guitar with the use of a looping system, pedals and wah (who thinks of that?? Genius!). Alex Schultz on percussion came to the front with a berimbau (of capoeira fame) for a surprise jam circle on Alba. Oliver brought out the nyckelharpa (“this weird wooden necklace”) for the Norse-inspired Galdra. The music, old and new, is as textured and multicoloured as their lightshow: the deep purples of Gwydion, the bright green of forest magic for the ecstatic dance of Rhiannon, the gentle gold of a ballad for the lonely princess, Lady Isobel.

“Magick is a whispered word, but solid like stone / The will to rise within your blood and bones“. Magic is thus explained to us as the power of imagination (“which we have to hang onto in this age of AI”), the power of manifestation, and the expelled chorus of a song like Nimue seems to grow around us like a living willow tree. There is much that has made our blood boil in the last few years, much grief buried and withstood, and there rarely are spaces for us to release it together. We as a crowd sing along to the war drum of Lament, an old dirge to guide the spirits of the dead home, and by the end of it, it feels ever so slightly easier to breathe.

It’s a serious concert, full of real historical instruments and magic texts, like the 17th century Hare Spell, but also both Oliver and Stephen are so funny. “You might just turn into a hare. If you want to be on the safe side, now’s your chance to escape.” We receive an excellent merch pitch, not only to keep physical media alive and the band touring, but also because “it’s Christmas in a few weeks”.

We were treated to an extended encore, including an old classic, the ballad Eine kalte Nacht, and I couldn’t help thinking please, please hold on to this, this sound you’ve built so beautifully, please keep this lightness and joy, please keep writing songs in German, don’t give in to the mainstream. How often do we even hear non-English songs in the UK, unless we look for them? How often do we let go of the need to understand every little detail and just embrace the beautiful and human at the heart of it all?

In a landscape too often portraying the past either with saccharine pastoral strokes or as a terrifying blood-drenched place, FAUN are one of few musical projects able to play with both light and dark, with both what made the past hard and what made it joyful, the magic we’ve learned and the magic we’ve lost, the constraints we’ve escaped and the freedom we’ve surrendered.

FAUN are on tour across Europe in 2025. Catch them live at the following dates.