Sleight of Elbow

Like Bellowhead, to whom they’re sometimes compared, Feast of Fiddles are a fearless big band, featuring a line-up of six fiddlers whose day jobs include Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, Show of Hands, Battlefield Band, Bully Wee and Lindisfarne. They are flanked by a rock-style back-up of guitars, keyboards, saxophone and accordion; all is held together by legendary drummer Dave Mattacks. Since forming for what was envisaged as a one-off lark in 1994, they have earned an impressive live reputation, reflected in a catalogue that includes three live albums. Somehow, they’ve even found time to release a couple of studio albums, albeit at three-year intervals. Their third comes after a four-year recording gap and demonstrates once again their breezily insouciant tendency to appropriate tunes from film, TV or other genres. ‘A String of Pearls’, for instance, is probably best known from the Glenn Miller Band version. What other brilliantly bonkers bunch could even conceive of ‘Siamese Kashmir’ – which blends ‘The March of the Siamese Children’ from The King and I with Led Zeppelin's ‘Kashmir’ – let alone pull it off with such aplomb?