We knew we were in for some glorious weather when we set off mid-morning for our long trip from St Albans down to north Devon to perform for our first ever time at the Bideford Folk Club.

Sharing the driving and punctuating the journey with stops at various motorway services (some better than others) meant that the heavy traffic and long distance didn’t prove overly taxing.

We arrived in Bideford around 4:00 pm in good time to join MC for the evening, John, and his wife for a cup of tea in their lovely garden, before slipping down to The Joiners Arms in central Bideford to set up for a 75- minute workshop for club members in which Rob introduced musicians at the club to some of the tunes and songs we perform.

The workshop was well attended by around ten club members, who brought along a wide variety of instruments and who proceeded to work hard on five pieces with great humour and commitment. Then, wonderfully well organised by John, it was time for everyone to have a pizza supper from the nearby Italian restaurant ahead of the evening's performance.

The upstairs room at The Joiners Arms is a nice, cosy, venue for the folk club and I'm pleased to report it filled to capacity before the evening's concert began.

This was our first ever gig in Devon and it was great to hear the club floor singers singing material that was new to us. Over the course of the evening, the four floor singers, who all sang and played very well, each performed two songs and, I confess, all eight of their songs were new to me.

In terms of our own performance, through the lockdown we have introduced quite a bit of new material including a lot with choruses. This seemed to prove ideal for Bideford Folk Club members who joined in everything with great gusto and skill. New self-penned songs like ‘Pirates Dressed in Pinstripes’ (about those who aid and abet money laundering in London) and new traditional songs such as ‘Nancy from London’ all seemed to go down very well.

We were given lots of excellent and supportive feedback after the performance which, given the work we’d put into rehearsals for this first series of gigs in a while, meant a lot to us.

Clearly, with a gig so far from home, we stayed in the local area that night.  Indeed, we were generously hosted by another senior club organiser, Alison. Amongst a great array of musical and community commitments, Alison does a wide range of business activities including running a B&B near Braunton. I can comfortably say without fear of contradiction that Rob and I had as comfortable a night ‘on the road’ as we have ever had in Alison's lovely B&B. Her hospitality was overwhelming and her company delightful.  We also had high drama as, by flinging himself like a professional goalkeeper, Rob was able to just prevent Alison's daredevil young cat, Laurie, making its escape through an upstairs window that had only a 3 metre drop to a concrete drive beneath.

We would very much like to thank John and Alison for all the kindness they showed to us and for looking after us so well in the beautiful town of Bideford. Likewise, we’d like to thank all those that worked so hard in the workshop and came out on a warm evening to see us perform. We thoroughly enjoyed our visit to the club and the town.

Rob and I got our June/July series of gigs off to a splendid start on the afternoon of Sunday 5th June with a relaxed trip to perform at the Richard Jefferies Museum in Coate, near Swindon.

With our good friend, Dave, we set off for Swindon around 10.00am to give ourselves plenty of time to arrive and set up for a performance at 2.00pm.  We were worried that the Platinum Jubilee traffic might be a problem, but I’m pleased to report the trip there (and back) proved unproblematic.

The Museum is a lasting monument to John Richard Jefferies (1848 - 1887) the English nature writer, noted for his depictions of English rural life in essays, books of natural history and in novels, and is located in Jefferies’ former house.

On arrival, we were met by museum organiser, Tony, who was kind enough to immediately put the kettle on and make us all a cuppa.

Having unloaded the gear on a veranda facing the Museum’s beautiful garden, we proceeded with our sound check.  Satisfied, we retired indoors to have a snack before performing. Despite dire predictions, the weather proved kind to us and, in the end, we played acoustically to an appreciative audience sat at trestle tables in the garden.  For a variety of reasons, we included more tunes in our set than usual and, at one point, Rob managed to persuade some in the audience to get up and dance.  I have to say, Museum organisers, Tony and Susie, led the dancing magnificently and everyone had an uproarious time.

Many thanks to Susie and Tony for the warmest of welcomes to the Museum and similar thanks go to Andrea for her initial invitation.   We have been invited to return to the Richard Jefferies Museum on Sunday 18th September 2022 as part of its month-long, sustainability-themed, programme called ‘Small Change’.

After the achingly long period of lockdown, the time had finally arrived.  We were going back out to headline a full gig at a real folk club with real people in it.  We’d had a couple of festival appearances in the interim but this was our first folk club gig since late 2019.  So, it was a great comfort to know we were playing the Watford Folk Club.  Watford was one of the first folk clubs to welcome Na-Mara as a headline guest and it has been unstinting in its support of our music for over a decade.

We’ve always been pretty disciplined with rehearsal and that is never going to change. So, over and above rehearsing on our own, Rob and I had managed to get together a reasonable number of times once restrictions had eased, to work up some new material as well as polish up some of our old favourites.

Perhaps traffic levels are still a little reduced post-lockdown, but we seemed to travel the dozen or so miles to Watford’s home venue, The Pump House, in very quick time, without encountering much by the way of the usual mayhem that is the Watford inner ring road.  Indeed, so much so that we arrived at the club a few minutes ahead of even the organisers.

A few minutes later Pete Nutkin pulled into the car park and it was great to see him again after such a long hiatus.  He welcomed us very warmly back to the club, which was greatly appreciated. So, together, with help from our great friend and supporter, Dave Berry, we carried the gear in and began setting up.   A few minutes later we were delighted to see fellow organiser Carrie Wright arrive.  We hadn’t seen Carrie for many years and it was lovely to catch up with all her news.

In the following hour up to the start of the evening, more friends began to arrive, some closely linked to the club like Dave Artus and Nigel Moorcroft and some newcomers to the club like Rob’s friends from Phoenix Mandolins, the mandolin orchestra he is now enjoying performing with.

Pete Nutkin kicked the  musical part of evening off and we were treated to some great music from him, Dave, Nigel, Carrie and a regular performer at Redbourn Folk Club, Simon.

We then took to the stage.  Our new set is pretty upbeat and we started with Irish favourite ‘P Stands for Paddy’.  The audience immediately showed their willingness to sing along.  Other introductions into the first set were a couple of new songs with me on the tenor guitar (a tenor built by luthier Paul Hathaway, tuned ADAD).  The first is a song about the role of London in global money laundering called ‘Pirates Dressed in Pinstripes’, the second a Canadian version of the traditional English song ‘Nancy from London’.  Rob has composed great accompaniments for both of them.

I’m pleased to say that a lot of people came up at half time to introduce themselves and talk about the songs. CD sales were encouragingly brisk.

The second half followed a similar format to the first except with the floor singers performing in reverse order.  Again, we were treated to a further excellent array of self penned and traditional songs.

Again, we opened with a new song for Na-Mara, the Irish traditional classic , ‘When I was a Fair Maid’.  I’ve been spending some time over lockdown following the excellent DADGAD Course and You Tube videos of Aodán Coyne (check them out!) and this was my chance to put some left hand development learning into action – and it went well.  It allowed Rob and me to do a nice instrumental duet together . Later in the set, we did something similar with the beautiful Irish song, ‘Verdant Braes of Screen’ – essentially a kissing cousin to ‘P Stands for Paddy’  in terms of its story but with a vastly different take and feel.

The evening drew to a close around 11.00pm and we were thrilled to receive kind words from Pete Nutkin as he wrapped the evening up before asking us for an encore, which we were obviously happy to provide.  After that, a goodly number of audience members were kind enough to come up and thank us for a lovely evening.    If we had had any concerns about being potentially rusty after a near two year gap, this feedback (and the absence of any unintended jazz intrusions into our performance) dispelled them.

After that, it was time to pack up. Ever willing, Dave helped Carrie and Pete tidy away.  After saying our goodbyes, the trip home was uneventful – what no road closures! – and we were home before midnight.  It had been a truly cracking evening.  

Many thanks to Pete, Carrie, Cynthia and others for all their hard work in getting the Watford Folk Club back up on its feet.  Also for their invitation to Na-Mara to perform, their continuing support for our music and for their warm welcome last night.  All were very much appreciated.

We had great fun yesterday evening performing at the St Neots Folk Festival and the great pleasure of seeing some old friends and making new ones as well.

The event was held in the Priory Centre in St Neots, the first of a three day festival to be held across the town.

The evening was kicked off by the immensely talented New Roots finalist, Callum MacKellar, who sang a range of songs from the West Country and the West Midlands unaccompanied.  I think his is a name we’ll hear a lot about in the folk world in the coming decades.

We then took the stage for our thirty minute set - our first live performance in over eighteen months.  Any nerves were made easer by having had the very warmest of welcomes from both St Neots Folk Club organisers and members alike. We had some new material that we were keen to try out and it all seemed to go down very well.

The second half of the evening featured the beautiful songs and compositions of Tom Bryans from Wisbech.  With loop peddles and classical guitar, Tom performed some delightful material.  My personal favourite was his musical tribute to walking the West Highland Way recently.

The evening was then brought to a close by the silky harmonies and arrangements of The Worthys, a trio formed from members of the St Neots Folk Club.  Appropriately, they finished their set and the evening with a splendid version of Richard Thompson’s Dimming of the Day.  Lovely.

Many thanks to Bob Hines, Patti and Roger and many others at St Neots Folk Club for their warm welcome and their invitation for us to perform.  It was an ideal opportunity to kickstart our performance programme and to try out some new material.

As a post-script, we discovered that the COVID lockdown might largely have ended but the post 10 o’clock-at-night road chaos has not.  The journey home, in the middle of a bout of panic buying of petrol, was a little worrying.  I knew we had just about enough petrol to get us back the forty miles to St Albans but, when we discovered the A1 was closed and that we had to drive an extra 15 miles across to the M1, I confess some worries began to creep in.  But, the diversion ended up being somewhat serendipitous in that we finally made it to Toddington service station and (albeit with notably hiked prices) were able to fill up there and make it home in confidence.

Given that the COVID-19 pandemic had effectively demolished our performance diary for 2020, it was lovely to receive an email from our friends at Cambridge Folk Club asking us to take part in one of their virtual showcase evenings.  In the musical emptiness of lockdown, this was our first ‘gig’ of any type since we had played in Oxford in early March and, I must say, it was nice to have something in the diary again to work towards. Rehearsing on one’s own can seem a bit unfocussed if you haven’t got something concrete to aim for.

The Cambridge Folk Club have been running these virtual showcase evenings for a while now and the idea is a clever one.  Regular club members join the event by Zoom.  This allows them to comment throughout the event and talk with each other before and after the show.  Meanwhile, the whole thing is simultaneously live streamed to the club’s Facebook page, and the wider audience can sit back and enjoy the evening there.

Rob and I were asked to finish the evening.  This took place after some great sets by fellow musicians on the programme.  Guitarist and singer-songwriter Wes Finch started the evening off with Jools Street on violin and Ben Haines on percussion.  Somehow the guys had managed to fit into the same room to perform but mix the sound in a way that allowed them to remain socially distanced.  Wonderful songs, expertly played. Very nice.

Daniel Nestlerode, who we have performed with in ceilidh band Tam Lin, then joined the evening from a holiday in northern France.  He played an excellent set of self-compositions and traditional songs and tunes on mandolin and guitar, concluding his performance with a song in French.  It was great to see him again on such good form.

Daniel was followed by the wonderful Phil Hare who was similarly on great form.  Rob and I had the good fortune to share a stage with Phil at the Festival at the Edge in Shropshire some years ago and it was nice of Phil to remember and make some kind comments about that.  As readers should know, Phil is a truly excellent guitarist, delivering his songs in a deep honeyed tone.  He is also extremely funny and tells some great tales.  His half hour set flew by.

Then it was our turn.

Given the ongoing issues of the pandemic, Rob and I were unable to perform together. Indeed, we hadn’t even been in the same physical space since that evening in Oxford in March.  So, we took alternative turns to perform from our respective homes. I don’t how long Rob spent that afternoon setting up to perform at his house, but I know I spent a decent while trying to re-arrange a bedroom into a performance space that wasn’t obviously a bedroom.

As Phil Hare’s set closed and the screen was allocated to me, I took the chance to inform the audience, some of whom I could see in little Zoom boxes across the top of my screen, that  ‘you’ve heard of Morecombe and Wise.  Well, tonight, you’re getting Morecombe or Wise’.

Between us, Rob and I had put together a set that covered traditional songs and tunes and our own compositions.  We also took the chance to air some new material.  Amongst this new material was Rob performing a Chinese tune called Han Hong, and me performing French traditional song in translation, ‘The Poisoned Brew’, a Canadian version of English traditional song ‘Nancy from London’ (taken from the singing of Matthew Byrne), Irish traditional classic ‘P’ Stands for Paddy’ and a new composition of ours about the scandal of money laundering through London called ‘Pirates Dressed in Pinstripes’.

Virtual concert performing was certainly a novel experience, singing in the quiet of a bedroom to an only partially visible and boxed audience, playing versions of songs and tunes restructured for solo-only performance.  I know I missed Rob being there to sprinkle his ‘magic-dust’ on what I do, and I hope he missed my chugging a rhythmic bass line along to his instrumentals.  As is the way with social media generally,  little comments from audience members flash up on your screen during performance,.  It takes discipline and mercifully rubbish eyesight on my part not to peek at what is being said until after you’ve finished.

Anyway, the hour we were on certainly flew by for us and reading the comments of audience members afterwards was rewarding.  Many thanks to all those listening in and being so supportive of what we do.

Many thanks to Marion Treby and Robin Mansfield for their invitation to join a virtual showcase alongside such great performers, and especial thanks go to the mighty Calvin Monk who showed such skill and who worked so hard behind the scenes to get the very best out of an wide array of highly idiosyncratic domestic recording environments.  In advance of the event, he produced some of the best technology related instructions I’ve ever seen – do what Calvin advises …..and it works – and his advice during the mini sound checks before the showcase started was invaluable.

We look forward to the day when we can visit the Cambridge Folk Club in person again and, until then we wish it, its members and all our fellow performers, the very best for the remainder of the lockdown.

After spending time writing and rehearsing through much of January and February, March 8th saw Na-Mara’s first performance outing of the year.  We were honoured to have been invited to perform alongside fellow musicians and actors at an event to commemorate the contribution and sacrifice made by men and women from Oxfordshire to the fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.  The venue was the Holywell Music Room in Oxford, a sublime and historical music venue once graced by Haydn himself and, it is rumoured, possibly Mozart.

We set off in good time and made it into the one-way system and parking puzzle that is Oxford in enough time to get a decent parking spot, cuppa and a sandwich before making our way to the venue.

The beautiful Holywell Music Room was a hive of activity when we arrived as a small stage was being erected and the hall itself was being decorated with posters from the period and flags of various types.

By the start time of 7.30pm, the venue was pleasingly well populated.  After an introduction from event organiser Colin Carritt, whose father fought in Spain and whose uncle sadly died fighting there, we performed the title track of our second album, The Bite.

Well known actors Alison Skilbeck, Tim Hardy and Jeff Robert then began to bring to life the story correspondence and poetry of many of the Oxfordshire International Brigade volunteers.  I, for one, remain in awe of the skill that actors possess to make the written word breathe.  All three made a great contribution to the evening that followed.

When attention turned to the role played by those who volunteered for medical service in Spain, we sang our song The English Penny, remembering nurse Penny Feiwel.  We later performed the song most associated today with the British Battalion, The Valley of Jarama, and we ended the first half of the programme by recounting the story of the 4,000 Basque child refugees to Britain in 1937, with our song ‘Only For Three Months.

Elsewhere in the programme we were treated to some truly wonderful Flamenco guitar from Marcos Young and it was a real pleasure to hear the powerful and beautiful songs and singing of Brenda and Manus O’Riordan.

Having made our contribution in the first half of the programme, we were then able to relax and listen to Alison, Tim and Jeff, helped by Manus and Brenda, bring the story of the International brigades in Spain to its conclusion.  All of the performances in the second half were excellent but I must report that Alison Skilbeck’s rendition, in both Spanish and English, of La Pasionaria’s farewell speech to the International Brigades was breath taking.

Very many thanks to Colin Carritt, John Hayward, Chris Farman, Marlene Sidaway and their many colleagues who worked so hard to make this event happen and for honouring us with an invitation to participate.

It was a splendid end to a splendid year of performances for Na-Mara at Rosslyn Hill Chapel in Hampstead, NW3.

Rob and I set off very early from St Albans to try and beat the London rush hour traffic but we failed.  Grim weather, heavy traffic and road works all conspired against us.  Thankfully, we were playing acoustically and, as such, we were a still able to arrive, unpack, set up and grab a sandwich well ahead of people arriving for the 7.30pm start.

Rob and I were performing two thirty-minute sets at a fund raiser for the wonderful Da Capo Music Foundation, a charity that believes every person should have the opportunity to discover the joy in making music and works phenomenally hard to achieve that vision.

Rosslyn Hill Chapel is a glorious venue for music.  A large, flexible, space to create virtually any audience layout, it has a superb acoustic.  I’ll confess that when I initially entered the chapel, I had some concerns about whether we could adequately fill the space with our instruments.  However, I was quickly comforted once Rob and I began our warm up.

The Da Capo Music Foundation has friends and supporters from across the musical spectrum and we were delighted that the sizeable audience in attendance at Rosslyn Hill Chapel was wonderfully well engaged with our music all evening.  The feedback we received at the end of the evening was warm and supportive.  We couldn’t have been happier.

Many thanks to Michelle Groves and Jane Cutler for the invitation to perform and we wish them every success with both Foundation and all their music educational ventures.

Following the unfortunate illness of one of their guest artists for the evening, club organisers at Cambridge Folk Club approached Rob and I about the possibility of stepping in to cover at short notice.  Always happy to reciprocate the decade long support Cambridge Folk Club has given to us, we were delighted to oblige.

Rob and I were both free that evening with the only complication being that Rob was up in Manchester through the day.  So, we organised for me to travel from St Albans with Rob’s gear and set us both up before the evening started.  This would allow Rob to arrive as soon as he was able and we could both then go straight into a sound check.  Given the risks around drive times from Manchester on a Friday evening, fellow double-headliner, Eric Sedge, very kindly agreed to take to the stage before us.

The evening was kicked off with half a dozen very beautiful songs and tunes by Sam Inglis on guitar and Abby Wollston on cello and nyckelharpa.  The combination of fine guitar work and the sonorous tones of the cello were a delight.

Then, Eric Sedge took to the stage.  Eric is a very experienced performer who has done a lot of work with Richard Digance and was also a leading member of The Broadside Boys.  Eric writes excellent songs and sings them wonderfully well.  Without doubt the most poignant song of the evening was Eric’s farewell to his former Broadside Boys partner, Mat Bayfield, who passed away recently.

With Rob safely arrived from the travails of the M62 and A1, he and I took the opportunity for a sound check over the break following Eric’s set.  Sound technician, Kelvin - who did a great job under pressure all evening - got us through the sound check in double quick time and we were ready in good time to do our 50-minute set.

We had put together a set focused on our new CD Sisters & Brothers.  The Cambridge audience was in good voice and ready to sing and, I have to say, we were on great form. Comments after the set suggested a number of audience members thought this our best ever performance at Cambridge and I’m inclined to agree with much of that down to Kelvin making us feel very at home on stage.

Thanks as always to Robin, Marion, Andy and others for thinking of us and inviting us to perform again at Cambridge Folk Club and we look forward to doing so again in the not too distant future.

Redbourn Folk Club has always provided great support for Na-Mara and its music and it is a real pleasure to perform there.  The venue - a former school room behind a pleasant pub in a small village between St Albans and Hemel Hempstead – somehow lends itself to intimacy.  The seats are closely packed together, with full bookshelves and neat little fireplace with mirror above forming the backcloth to the performance area.

Of course, another great advantage for us of Redbourn Folk Club is its proximity, being located on the same side of St Albans as we are.  This means we can leave a little later and arrive home a little earlier than any other of our gigs.

So, with rush hour fading, we set off to Redbourn and arrived with ease at the venue around 7.15pm.  Club organiser Jenny was just finishing re-arranging the room and it was very nice to catch up with all her news.  Soon afterwards fellow club organiser, old friend and MC for the night Malcolm Hobbs arrived.  As always, Jenny and Malcolm were wonderfully welcoming and, as we set up and the clock ticked towards 8.00pm, the venue filled pretty much to capacity.

Malcolm kicked the evening off with a couple of songs robustly delivered as always with his powerful voice and bouzouki playing.  Malcolm was then followed, first, by an excellent guitar-flute duo (profuse apologies for not catching the performers’ names) and, finally, for the first round of floor singing, we had two lovely songs from Linda Birmingham.

Our first set went very well and, with the help of the floor singers, the audience was well primed to sing along  - which they did with gusto.

At the first break, we had both kind words regarding our first set and, for me, two lovely surprises.  First, a man of a similar age to me approached and asked if I remembered him childhood days in Middlesbrough (my hometown).   As I attempted to roll back the years, he kindly prompted me, informing me that he was the brother of my first ever girlfriend nearly fifty (did I just type that…) years ago.  I was absolutely delighted to see him again and to find out what he and his sister were now doing and to know they were enjoying life.  Girlfriends’ brothers can be a bit prickly towards their sister’s boyfriends, but that was not my experience.  I had the fondest memories of him and, like his sister, knew him also to be an excellent musician and singer.

Then, as we talked, another man around my age approached and introduced himself in much the same way, ‘did I remember him?’ - and it was someone I had worked with around ten years earlier and, yes, I remembered him well.  We’d always had a good working relationship dealing with some common issues and it was lovely to see him again, too.

And then it was back to the music.

The second half was kicked off with a great couple of thought-provoking self-compositions about the attractions and dangers of the new online technologies from Kimpton-based singer, Steve Warner, whom I had first seen as a very good tenor guitar player at Watford Folk Club.   Steve was then encouraged to do a third song and, albeit on a lighter subject note, it proved yet another excellent toe-tapper.  The guitar-flute duo then performed a very funny song about the inhabitants of Whipsnade Zoo and, finally, to my utter delight, Malcolm Hobbs returned to the stage to perform what I consider to be the best rendition I’ve ever heard of Graham Moore’s great song, ‘Tom Paine’s Bones’.

I’m pleased to say the second set went equally well as the first for us and we finished with ‘Maid of Culmore’ as our requested encore.  I guess when someone then comes up and buys five CDs in one go, you must be doing something right.  Doubly so when you find out that the buyer had been recommended to come along by someone who’d seen us perform in September in Glossop on our little northern mini-tour.

As we packed up the gear as we chatted to club members and organisers, the club room slowly emptied.  It had been a cracking evening all ways round.  In time, we said our goodbyes to Malcolm and Jenny and, fifteen minutes later, I’m home lifting a beer out of the fridge.

Many thanks to Jenny and Malcolm for the invitation to perform again at Redbourn and we very much look forward to making our return to the club in the not too distant future.

The Invisible Folk Club is a UK based, virtual, folk club that encourages and enables authentic music, both ancient and modern, through the production of radio programmes and podcasts.  These programmes are played on community radio stations and later released as podcasts. The club is the brainchild of Jon Bickley and Stephen Yarwood and Rob and I were honoured to be invited to participate in the recording of a future podcast.

The shows have a late-night, relaxed, feel which intersperses discussion and musical performances and are usually recorded at Jon’s house in Chesham.  As such, it was an easy journey for Rob and me to make - with only the slightest hint of Christmas shopping beginning to cause chaos at the ‘magic roundabout’ in Hemel Hempstead (six mini-roundabouts around one central roundabout!) to give us any travel issues.

We arrived in Chesham at 2.00pm and, with the rain pelting down, were pleased to see Jon ready to usher us quickly into the dry of his house. We didn’t quite know what to expect but Jon soon put a cup of tea into our mits and us at our ease.  After that, the afternoon simply whizzed by.

Jon had clearly done his research and had some great questions to ask us.  These ranged from how Rob and I came to perform together, how we go about our business as a folk act (e.g. how we market ourselves and get gigs, the importance of blogging and social media, how to make the best of a website, how we put our sets together, etc), through to our connections with organisations not directly connected to folk music but are open to it as part of what they do (e.g. historical societies, political organisations, etc) and, finally, through to some wider questions about the issues facing the current folk club scene.   All of this was interspersed with us performing songs and tunes to punctuate the conversation or provide examples of what we’d just been talking about.

Our recording is now in production with Jon’s colleague, Stephen Yarwood, and the finished programme/podcast should be broadcast early in the New Year.   Many thanks to Jon for the initial invitation to join the podcast and for his hospitality and thoughtful questioning throughout our time together.  We very much look forward to hearing the finished podcast.

The Invisible Folk Club’s weekly programmes can be heard on four community radio stations between Doncaster to Cornwall, and as podcasts on Mixcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Tunein and elsewhere.  (To date, the podcasts have had over 11,000 downloads.) Details can all be found on The Invisible Folk Club website,  https://invisiblefolkclub.com/