From the London Evening StandardRtS
Hands up at the Albert Hall

Show Of Hands
by Alex Hannaford
In the Cornish village of Port Isaac, little stone cottages nestle side by side in the picturesque, cobbled streets. Steve Knightley and Phil Beer, aka Show of Hands, are sitting in a converted chapel a short walk from the shore, tuning an assortment of guitars, violins and mandolins. In a few hours, they'll play to a crowd of 80. It's almost the end of a month-long tour that started at the Albert Hole, a small club in Bristol. Each venue has seated 60 to 80 people, but on Saturday the pair headline at the Royal Albert Hall. What's more, it's almost sold out, with farmers, fishermen and country folk from all over the UK descending on the capital.

"There's not some big promoter booking us to play at the Albert Hall," says Knightley, the band's songwriter and vocalist. "We're saying there's music in the countryside - in festivals, clubs and art centres, and which isn't being played on the radio - which can fill the most famous venue in the world. We're going to turn it into a village hall. It will be full of people who know each other. We'll have a raffle and tell anecdotes and stories in between songs."

It's what Show of Hands did five years ago. They booked the Albert Hall, sent flyers to 15,000 people on the mailing list and played a sellout.

Most of Knightley's songs are set in seemingly blissful villages, but, for him, their beauty is only skin-deep. "People come to Cornwall but the interior is basically a post-industrial landscape," he says. "Everywhere there are the ruins of mines. Thousands of families connected with those industries are scattered throughout the world. If you live in a small West Country town like I do and they're opening a Co-op super-store or a Tesco, you know the names and the faces of every family firm that will close down."

Knightley's songs reflect his passion for rural England and his concerns about globalisation, from the catchy folk song Cousin Jack, about Cornish tin mines, to The Flood, about the chalk mines of southern England being saturated by rain.

"There are places in the world with not enough rain and people there are struggling to get into Europe to find work. We're putting up barriers to prevent them coming in," he says, "when we're refreshed by people who come here. It all adds to what we are."

Multi-instrumentalist and backing vocalist Phil Beer started his musical career in The Albion Band while Knightley threw himself into the post-punk scene in London in the early Eighties. After meeting Knight-ley in their home town of Exeter, Beer left The Albion Band in 1991 and Show of Hands was born.

Knightley is philosophical that it has taken until his forties to be successful. "If you achieve a certain type of success in your twenties, it can destroy you as a person, unless you stay around long enough and re-invent yourself as a troubadour.

"We wish at times that younger people got to hear our stuff. If only local BBC radio would play one song in 10 by a local artist, otherwise the music industry is this cosy little stitch-up between boy bands, distributors, record companies and the media, which ultimately will destroy them."

They play a village hall again the week after the Albert Hall gig. "Then we can never be perceived as being out of touch. That always confounds the whole music biz preconceptions."

PLAYING AT Royal Albert Hall Apr 7, 7.30pm