This Is The Kit Live from the Barbican Start time: 8pm Approximate running time: 60 minutes, no interval Please note all timings are approximate and subject to change. This performance is subject to government guidelines This Is The Kit’s Kate Stables talks about their latest album and the pandemic’s impact with Martin Aston. When Kate Stables decided to name the latest This Is The Kit album Off Off On, she wasn’t to know that her three- word representation of indecision or flux was ideal for Britain’s current approach to lockdown and ‘tier’ management. Then again, it should be Off On Off… ‘I see how Off Off On resonates, or the words in any order!’ she says. ‘It was a complete accident, but human beings like to see patterns and coincidences. That’s life.’ Stables is from Winchester; she launched This Is The Kit whilst living in Bristol, and since 2007 has lived in Paris, currently in the 10th arrondissement, within easy reach of transport hub Garde Du Nord. But COVID-19 has wreaked havoc with travel plans, live gigs and – given her band all live in the UK – rehearsal plans. This Is The Kit have managed to play three socially-distanced gigs in France since Off Off On was released in October, but with ‘a back-up French rescue team,’ Stables says. The livestreamed Barbican show will unite her again with the true This Is The Kit: Rozi Plain (bass/vocals), Neil Smith (guitar) and Jamie Whitby-Coles (drum/vocals), playing Off Off On songs on stage for the first time– even though Stables will have to quarantine before she can start socially-distanced rehearsals. ‘It’s so worth jumping through hoops,’ she says, ‘because I really miss my band and playing with them. I’m, listening to Off Off On more than I have any of my other albums, because I miss them so much!’ Bar the final mixing, Off Off On was finished just days before France first locked down. Back in Paris, Stables found herself initially appreciating the quiet and calm – ‘I hadn’t been at home for longer than four weeks at a time for at least seven years’ – before she succumbed to ‘isolation-itis. I really missed gigs, and the energy exchange with the audience, being in the moment.’ Off Off On is the fifth This Is The Kit album, a record of mesmerising, fluid dynamics and patterns that shows just how far Stables has come since her earliest incarnation, a banjo-playing solo folksinger resembling the spiritual heir of Anne Briggs (with a dash of Sandy Denny and Bridget St John). Having left school and spent a year travelling around Britain (‘Whilst everyone else was in Thailand and Australia, I was exploring this amazing country, meeting amazing people and crashing on their floors.’), she eventually settled in Bristol, playing open mic pub gigs, then formed the acoustic duo Whalebone Polly with singer/guitarist Rachael Dadd, and joined a community choir, led by husband-to-be Jesse Vernon, the former guitarist of Bristol’s psych-rock troupers The Moonflowers. Just before they decamped to Paris, the newly loved-up couple recorded her song ‘Two Wooden Spoons’, which Rob Da Bank’s Sunday Best label picked up for the 2006 compilation Folk Off. Still, rather than pursue a standard career path, the pair left the UK. ‘We were up for a big jump, an adventure new to us both,’ Stables recalls. ‘Let’s see if we can learn stuff you can only learn from living in a foreign country.’ In new surroundings, This Is The Kit turned into a band, and their sound evolved into something balmier: jazzy cadences, tranquil woodwind, soulful brass, African hi-life and desert blues, like a mellow sister to Solid Air-era John Martyn. ‘My music is very European,’ she vouches, ‘but music from other countries seeps in. I love things that flow repetitively and rhythmically.’ Elbow’s Guy Garvey, whilst DJing at BBC 6 Music, was the first to publicly lend support, before a fortuitous introduction to The National’s guitarist Aaron Dessner led to the American producing This Is The Kit’s Bashed Out album. The National subsequently took Stables on tour with them as a featured vocalist, during which she wrote most of Off Off On, spanning themes of resilience (‘Started Again’), anxiety (‘This is What You Did’) and courage (‘Keep Going’). It turns out that not only the album title chimes with the present situation. ‘Yeah, it’s a bit spooky. I sing about breathing – though that’s not uncommon - but coughing too, and hospitals, sickness and mental health, about being careful about what we do, our relationship between staying inside and inside your head and getting outside and needing to interact with others.’ Maybe Stables has precognitive powers! She sums up the theme of Off Off On’s immediate predecessor Moonshine Freeze as ‘We inevitably come up against challenging situations that explode your whole world, and you have to start again.’ So it goes for This Is The Kit in 2021, but at least she can start the year with a real live gig with her beloved band, plus a three-piece horn section – featuring trombonist Sam Hayfield, saxophonist Lorenzo Prati and trumpeter Pete Judge – and film projections by her old schoolfriends Pete McPartlan and Peter Todd. And as the order of the words Off Off On shows, there is an air of optimism – ‘as in, “not growing, not growing, growing”, or “out of sync, out of sync, in sync”. Not being hopeful would be too depressing! It’s good if we keep encouraging each other to keep going.’ Performers Kate Stables vocals Jamie Whitby-Coles drums, vocals Neil Smith guitar Rozi Plain bass, vocals Lorenzo Prati saxophone Pete Judge trumpet Sam Hayfield trombone Pete McPartlan film projection Peter Todd Produced by the Barbican .