I first saw the British duo QuickSilver at Stonehaven Festival in Scotland in 2005.  I was intensely curious;  I knew Grant Baynham and Hilary Spencer personally, and knew each to be a formidable performer in their own right, yet I had a hard time imagining what the combined entity would be like.
My attention to their performance was somewhat compromised, probably due to the fact that I was supposed to be on stage myself right after their set (as a member of top Canadian band Tanglefoot - HS) but it was impossible to mistake Grant’s masterful guitar playing and Hilary’s legendary voice, not to mention the electric response they elicited from the audience.  I had a much better opportunity to immerse myself in QuickSilver a couple of months later (and closer to home) at the Cuckoo’s Nest Folk Club in London, Ontario.  It’s a small and intimate venue that suited both my mood and their performance, and in the warm and familiar confines of Chaucer’s Pub, I was able to hear QuickSilver at what is likely their best.
It would be difficult to overstate the level of musical proficiency these two have achieved.  Baynham is a guitarist of spectacular ability - you find yourself looking around the stage to see where the orchestra is hiding.  Spencer’s voice is magnificent - powerful and majestic one moment, haunting and ethereal the next.  Either could easily overwhelm a lesser colleague, but each makes room for the other in a liquid ebb-and-flow that held me in delight for two hours.  Their material, whether original or borrowed, is literate, clever and varied, showcasing both their individual skill-set and their combined potency.
And every now and then one or the other would cut loose and treat us to a stunning display of firepower.  The effortless intricacy of Grant Baynham’s guitar playing is simply dazzling, while Hilary Spencer has just about the best voice I’ve ever heard anywhere, period.
I’ve been through enough personnel changes in my own musical career to know that one plus one doesn’t always add up to two.  Chemistry is everything when it comes to ensemble performance, and you can’t necessarily stick a couple of virtuosi together and expect good things to happen.  Sometimes not much happens at all.  This would prove to be different.  There was real chemistry from the outset:  they complemented each other wonderfully in pace, timing, delivery and all the subtle minutiae that distinguishes the excellent from the merely competent.  The breezy relaxed interaction marked them for the seasoned raconteurs they are - a couple of veterans of the British music scene with decades of experience in creating music, crafting performances and making warm connection with the audience.
QuickSilver is high entertainment, and I’ll be very surprised if their reputation as such does not proliferate quickly through the folk/roots community on both sides of the Atlantic.

Flanders and Swann, Victoria Wood, Richard Stilgoe, Django Reinhardt, Franz Schubert, Edith Piaf, Jake Thackray, Fats Waller - they were all at the Invershin Hotel last Saturday night.
Well, obviously not in person, as many are long since deceased, but none of them would have performed their pieces any better than their interpreters on that evening.
The duo QuickSilver are Hilary Spencer and Grant Baynham, the former a formidable talent honed over many years of professional singing on stage as well as a 20 year stint with the a cappella group Artisan, and the latter a singer-guitarist who has no difficulty interpreting the two-finger “snakes and ladders” runs of Django up and down the fingerboard and then following on with Bach and Scarlatti.
Grant spent five years as resident performer on the TV show “That’s Life!” in the footsteps of his friend, the late Jake Thackray, and he has a similar way of using words and music to illuminate the quirky corners of life that many of us don’t take the time or opportunity to look into.
He has a strident voice which ranges from baritone to almost counter-tenor in the high harmonies he traces behind Hilary’s strong contralto, though she too has a vocal variety that can amaze the listener.
She sings La Vie En Rose a la Piaf (the acoustics of the room suited this perfectly) but then effortlessly ascends into the soprano realm, softening the voice en route.  This is all achieved without recourse to wide vibrato, a device that, for this writer, has spoilt many a performance in the past.