The Point
Music scenes move at such giddying rates nowadays that it's perfectly possible to witness the birth, death and revival of a scene in the gestation period of a mayfly. The NME represent a sort of depraved musical Bernard Matthews, pumping poor, pubescent indie whippersnappers full of hype-hormones until their skinny-jeans burst, only to insert meat-hooks into their twitching bodies and make them dance once more like macabre marionettes. With this in mind, it's nice to see a band looking slightly further back for the scene they revive. Slightly further... say 500 years?

Guitarist and singer Michael Tyack takes to the stage wearing what can only be described as Medieval negligee: a pair of rather anatomically descriptive stockings and a crocheted nightshirt. I'd be worried he might catch his Black Death, were he not also wearing a rather stout pair of knee high buckskin boots and an eminently practical plague-doctor's hat.

It would be easy to write Circulus off as a joke - albeit a rather good one, full of Python-esque banter and costumes that are Tudor-couture by way of Carnaby Street - were not the music so good. Tyack begins their first song with a serpentine guitar riff, that in its Medieval melody is both strangely familiar and otherworldly, before the bass and drums kick in, creating a pulsing groove that bridges the gap between the 1470s and 1970s.

Tyack's guitar is frequently doubled by one of a plethora of wind instruments played masterfully by Will Summers (who, incidentally, is dressed rather conservatively in a pleated white shirt and floor length, braided waistcoat). He provides a virtuoso demonstration of the crumhorn (a medieval wind instrument that resembles a shepherd's crook), which, with its ability to replicate the sound of a distorted Moog crossed with a goose being strangled, has surely been unfairly overlooked in modern rock music.

Mid-way through the set we are invited to the "Acid Taverne". This is when things take on the mood of a rather rowdy Goose Fair, where some jester's spiked the mead. Tyack's distorted lute and Summers' wind instruments skip a merry jig over some furious, shamanistic drumming; and the diminutive, pixie-like maiden who's so far been providing backing vocals leads the crowd into a drunken, jigging mess in search of a maypole.

There is something oddly timeless about Circulus' music. Much as it wear's its medieval influences on its (Green) sleeve, it is not constrained by this - indeed, Tyack has spoken of a rather sniffy reaction from the "Lute Mafia" of the early music cognoscenti. 70s folk-rock, with the female backing vocals and melodic electric guitar riffs, is an equally strong influence, and the set is peppered with eminently radio-friendly choruses (perhaps inevitably distanced from the playlists by virtue of being swathed in crumhorn and featuring lyrical references to pixies). Futuristic pop music imagined by a band of time-travelling mynstrelles somehow stranded in the 1970s seems the only correct, if convoluted, description.

Tyack is a charismatic frontman. Indeed, he would have to be to convince five other people join him on stage, indulge his love for arcane hosiery and share this with a paying audience. Between songs - each of which, beneath the medieval filigree is a piece of finely honed melodic pop - he jokes with the audience and takes off on gently amusing flights of whimsy. Is this a joke? Tyack seems happy to receive mockery, which must be an occupational hazard of a Medieval prog-folk revivalist in contemporary Britain. But to see Circulus as a joke would be to miss the point.

"Thought becomes reality" is a mantra Tyack repeats throughout the evening. What Circulus are is a brilliant, fantastical creation of a classically eccentric English auteur. In these times of economic doom and gloom, a dose of escapism is a very welcome one indeed, especially to a world as exotic, and lovingly created, as this one.

words and pictures by Robin Wilkinson