The Bee Tellers

The Habit, York

6 June 2024

On paper, York is an easy trip for for me. So when Heather Findlay and Simon Snaize announced a regular weekly residency at The Habit some months ago, I should have been here instantly and regularly. In practice, a trip to York on a work night isn't so easy, and the fact that it was weekly made it easy to say, "I'll skip this one and go another week."

All this is just my way of saying, I'm sorry. I should have been here weeks ago.

Because it's Heather Findlay, and that in itself should have been enough reason to drop everything and make it happen. And her partner in this new venture in Simon Snaize, who I know from way back when he joined Heather's touring band, and from his superb album The Structure of Recollection (which we get a couple of songs from tonight). Simon is the ideal complement to Heather: their voices blend flawlessly, and he's equally at home taking the lead vocal or backing Heather's lead. His acoustic guitar work is stunning, playing beautiful and intricate lead lines over Heather's chords (or sometimes over his own chords; I'm fairly sure there's some looping going on occasionally when he's the only guitar player).

I'll admit the set list surprised me (but that's a good thing, apart from the omission of Evergreen, which is a bad thing). As expected, it ranged across both of their back catalogues, and obviously I knew all of Heather's, and they lulled me into a false sense of security by starting with a bunch of her songs (though not the ones I would have expected), but Simon's catalogue is much bigger than the Structure ... album, so almost all of his material later in the set was new to me. On top of this, of course, were the handful of songs they have recorded, or will record, as part of the Bee Tellers project, and it all added up to a wonderful evening of discovery, and surprises, and just genuine beauty.

And I think that's all I need to say. Because you already know the rest.