After a journey to the east earlier in the week, this time it was our turn to journey north  - to Stony Stratford, a  small village on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, to visit the renowned Song Loft folk club.  The club meets on a Friday night in a very nice room upstairs in the Cock Hotel on Stony Stratford’s High Street. As with the Hoy-at-Anchor folk club, the welcome at The Song Loft was very warm from the moment we walked in.

This is a busy and talented club. MC for the evening Brian started the proceeding with an excellent song and great north-eastern wit which was evident throughout the whole evening. Fellow club organiser Maurice and his partner then did a couple of very nice songs.  We went on for three numbers in the middle of the first round and I am pleased to report tapping feet and nodding heads were much in evidence as we played; the reception to our material seemed very positive indeed.  The first finished with a nice Scottish set performed by club regulars, (small) bagpipes and all.

The second half had a very similar and high level of club talent on show as the first, and Rob and I were honoured to be asked to return to play another couple of songs.  The standard of banter remained absolutely excellent throughout the evening and the impression was very much one of a group of friends enjoying each other’s company greatly.

Friends Paul and Pam Ward, who we have seen at various clubs around the region over recent times were also visiting The Song Loft that night, and it was really nice to get the chance to again listen to their very beautiful songs about industrial Sheffield and a terrific song about experiences Pam’s father had in the Second World War. Pam has a great voice and Paul is a very fluid and silky guitarist who makes some lovely sounds.

We had a good chat with the club organisers at the end of the evening and we very much hope to make the return trip to Stony Stratford early in the New Year.  With some good sounds on in the car on the way home and a bottle of beer as a wind down once back in the house, the night was happily complete.

It warms the cockles of your heart to turn up at a new venue and, before you have even gone inside, you see that it has the commitment to announce to the world the presence and details of the folk club it hosts.  So, it was at the Hoy-at-Anchor Folk Club held on Tuesday nights at The Ship Hotel in Leigh on Sea. 

Climbing the stairs to the room where the folk club is held, one is again impressed by the array of pictures of artists past, present and future who have played at the club or soon will be.

As part of our general drive to get ourselves better known across a wider array of clubs, Rob and I had decided some time ago that Hoy-at-Anchor was a club we very much wanted to go and visit. We had identified a singer’s night and were pleased that the M25 was benign enough to get to Leigh-on-Sea on a workday night, with plenty of time to park up and wander in to the club with 15 minutes to spare.

The welcome was warm from the outset with club organiser, Tony Prior, being very welcoming on our arrival. This welcome was to be extended throughout the evening from a very wide range of club members.  Singer’s nights are free at the club.  So, Rob and I were more than happy to contribute some income to the club and enlist as proud members of this excellent folk club.

The club is very much our type of club. It is a listening audience that is willing to give attention to all kinds of music.  The quality of the floorsingers was excellent and covered a wide range of styles from traditional instrumentals, through to Neil Young, Bob Dylan and a great rendition of Loudon Wainwright’s ‘Dead Skunk (in the Middle of the Road)’ by Mick Denny, who was kind enough to give us a copy of his very nicely produced CD – for which many thanks!  There was also some moving poetry read out to what was now a very full room.   I was able to have a very pleasant chat with Mick and poet, Frank, in the downstairs bar whilst buying a pint of excellent (and strong) ale – Rob was driving.

Rather unnervingly there is an informal vote for acts in the first round of the evening to be invited back for the second – and, I’m pleased to say we made the cut (phew!) and, indeed, we were honoured to then be invited to do a third song to finish off the second round. We performed Three Bonny Ships, Only For Three Months and Billy Don’t You Weep for Me and all seemed to go down well. 

The third part of the evening was given over to a performance by local four-piece Legacy, who showed great musicality and arrangement in their 40 minute set and were kind enough, during a hiatus to sort out some technical issues, to mention that they had been moved by the story of the Basque children in Only For Three Months.

We very much hope to return to Hoy-at-Anchor in 2012 and would, again, like to thank Tony and all of his club members for extending such a warm welcome to two newcomers. 

Following our visit to the Lost Horizons Folk Club back in mid-April 2011, organisers Trish and Paul had invited us back to play as part of the Leytonstone Festival   - something we were very pleased and willing to do.

Our blog record for the 15^th April 2011 records what a lively place this is to play – this is no ordinary folk club.  We were again upstairs at The Sheepwalk pub on Leytonstone High Street, and the atmosphere was similarly buzzing to the last time we had been there.  Trish and Paul were wonderfully welcoming again.  The upstairs room in the pub was once again filled with young people meeting and greeting each other, and the support they gave for the acts drawn from their group of friends was great and very touching –the young talent on show at the club is truly excellent.

Steve O’Donoghue started the night and was superb at getting everybody up and going.  I don’t know whether he has ever recorded his song ‘Accident of Birth’ , about the various ways in which ‘they’ are just the same as ‘us’ – but I love it and think it very very insightful.  Amongst others, Steve’s son Will did a great set of numbers. Paul and Trisha’s son, James did similarly – with friends knowing all the words, etc.  George Gilman did an excellent set, as his brother had done earlier – these are two very talented siblings!

The other support guests for the evening were the virtuoso duo Bow and Bellows, playing music from across central and eastern Europe.  If you haven’t seen Bow and Bellows, you should go and have a look – they play with both humour and great musicality.

We played a variety of loud and soft, and both got a wonderful listening to.  After the Fringe in the Fen gig, we were on top of our game and felt we did really well.  Russ, from Walthamstow Folk Club was on sound, and did an excellent job for us and, somehow, his sound mix and the atmosphere generally seemed to draw a little bit extra from us.

Top of the bill was Robb Johnson with his high energy, high powered songs about the plight of Britain today – all with great rhythm and memorable lyrics.  This was the first time I had seen him play – and he really got the jive jumpin’.  How his hand doesn’t drop off from the complex strumming patterns he does, I’ll never know!

With Rob driving and us finished with a while to go before the bar closed, a couple of pints of Speckled Hen then went down very well – a nice way to end a hardworking musical week – and no 6.00am start the next morning! 

Thanks to Trish and Paul, and all the home team at Lost Horizons for another enjoyable evening and looking after us so well again.

It is always a pleasure to play at the Watford Folk Club.  The organisers are so welcoming and friendly, there is so much talent amongst the floor singers , and they are listeners - the ideal audience for our music.  It had been some 18 months since we and, as such, we very much looked forward to the relatively short trip across the M25 to get there.  We were not disappointed. 

Floor singers all performed to the highest quality.   They performed both unaccompanied and armed with guitars, dulcimers, steel guitars, proved very entertaining, and with songs drawn from across the British Isles and North America, as well as one excellent song sung in Spanish.  It was lovely to see organiser Helen Chinn now accompanying her wonderful folk voice with nice guitar work as well.

Despite a headcold which increased the chances of my turning into anything from Sam the yodelling cowboy to Barry White dramatically over the course of the evening, apart from a few rusty moments in the first couple of songs, my voice settled down and didn’t appear cause too many issues.  We had the chance to play songs like The Silver Duro, The English Penny and Avery and the Merchants of Bristol for the first time at the club and they seemed to go down very well.  Very kindly, we were asked to do an encore at the end of the night and finished with Tri martolod/Three matelots.

We wish all at the Watford Folk Club well.  They have an excellent venue with easy parking, the organisers are very friendly, and they have some great talent in the club.  If you are in the Watford area and you like folk music, get along to this lovely club!

Mike Blair of the Bedford Folk Club has reviewed all three of our albums for Unicorn Magazine and, in so doing, has provided us with excellent feedback and constructive criticism that we have valued enormously.  Following his recent review of ‘The Bite’, we got in touch with Mike to properly thank him for both his kind words and for the help he had inadvertently given us over recent years.  In the correspondence that followed, Mike mentioned the Bedford Club and Rob and I thought it would be a great idea to finally meet Mike and visit one of the nearby clubs that we had not yet visited.

Bedford is a singers club for its members, rarely (if ever) inviting guest artists.  The members of the club all clearly know each other very well and the banter between them is absolutely top notch.  It was a real pleasure to meet with Mike and his fellow club members, who made Rob and I feel extremely welcome.  There is a lot of talent sat around the room at Daley's Club, just off the Bedford Road in Kempston. We had everything from a wonderful unaccompanied version of the Bruce Springsteen classic ‘A cautious man’, to a Noel Coward song, through Joni Mitchell, Tom Paxton and traditional songs from around the British Isles and North America.   Some extremely funny self penned songs were sung also – including one about Sweeney Todd – who had ‘a finger in every pie’.

The good humour evident in the room was later followed up by a laugh-out-loud Newsletter – somebody somewhere has missed their vocation in life.  We were warmly welcomed and, having travelled, were given more than our fair share of time performing.  Everyone seemed to enjoy what we did, and the invitation remains open for us to return – something we absolutely will do.  May thanks and best wishes to all at the Bedford Folk Club.

What an interesting venue! What an interesting club!

For Rob and I, this was the first time we had ventured into Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, near Regent’s Park in London.   Every Tuesday, the Sharps Folk Club has a singaround and, in line with our desire to become better known in the London Folk scene, this was an obvious place for us to want to visit.

For those who haven’t been to Cecil Sharp House it is a lovely, if rather imposing, venue. Fortunately, we were playing in a snug little bar on the lower ground floor where the hosts were friendly and the atmosphere was warm.  The room soon filled up and the small bar was selling good beer 

As one might have expected for such a venerable venue, the quality of the floorsinging was excellent and varied.  It seemed like almost everybody in the room was going to do a turn, and that wasn’t far off the truth of it.  There was music from all parts of the British Isles and North America.  The thing that struck me most was the very obvious knowledge that was held by those in that room.  I have listened to folk music, almost exclusively, from the age of 17 and I confess that I only recognised every fourth song that was performed over the course of the evening.  So, it was great to hear (to me at least) new material.

Rob and I appeared to go down well and, having expected to only get chance to play one possibly two numbers, we were eventually given space to perform four, with the hostess for the evening allowing us to finish the night off and saying some very kind words about our performances.

One of the songs we played was our composition Nellie Torrence and Jeannie Waldie, which is about the first (female) body snatchers in Edinburgh.  A fellow floor singer paid us the ultimate compliment at the end of the night when he asked me to remind him of the title of the song as he was intending to go upstairs to the library at Cecil Sharp House at some stage to find the song and possibly research it in a bit more detail.   He explained his own name was Burke and so he had an interest in such matters.  However, it was a great accolade to have a well versed folk singer thinking that one of our songs was traditional.  It suggests we are getting the tone and the delivery of our songs about right. 

Early on the morning immediately after the Knights of Harmony concert I had to set off to Washington DC on ‘day job’ duties.  I did not return across the pond until the morning of the 19^th October and so it was that evening that  I went straight into another gig; this time at Jon McNamara’s (no relation) Stortfolk folk club at Bishop’s Stortford.  Thankfully, I hadn’t had to go back into work that morning.  So, I had managed to grab a couple of hours sleep in the afternoon after not sleeping too well on the ‘red-eye’, before Rob picked me up.  So, I was feeling OK by the time we got to the gig.

Stortfolk is in a new venue now and very nice it is too; a cosy room at the Royal British Legion club in the town.  For those that don’t know it, Stortfolk is a club with some excellent instrumentalists - certainly on accordion and whistles of every hue.  Jon himself does a nice line in music hall numbers, and the whole club is always and universally very friendly.

Numbers were small that night but everybody enthusiastically joined in on our choruses and Rob and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  Jon has always been very supportive of our work and it was great to see him again. He was most kind to us, both privately and in his introductions to the audience.  We also sold a few CDs which was very encouraging too.

Now wide awake, I wasn’t quite sure how the night’s sleep was going to go.  However, with Rob driving and him having recently bought me a birthday present of a bottle sized cool bag, I had my ‘night medicine’ with me, nice and cool – a bottle of Hook Norton Gold, to drink in the car on the way home.  We tend never to drink before we perform but a glug on the way home is very nice. Poor Rob had to keep his eyes on the road as I slurped my pint.  That night I can report, I slept like a baby!

Saturday 15^th October, saw Rob and I off to the Elgiva Theatre in Chesham to take part in an evening of Barber Shop music organised by the Barber Shop choir known as The Knights of Harmony.  Every year the Knights hold a concert and every year they invite a musical act from a different genre to add a little variety into the evening.

Rob and I have been lucky over the years to have been well treated by a whole range of folk club and festival organisers.  However, the welcome from the Knights of Harmony was truly remarkable.  They had thought of everything and they were kind and helpful to us throughout.  We were given a superb green room, which we shared with national Barber Shop champions Steel and next door to the national female champions, Miss Demeanour.  When we got in there, there were sandwiches, fruit and water waiting for us.  We were given a hand to get our kit in and out of the building, and on and off the stage – all done with the cheeriest of smiles and good humour.   We had chance to do a full and proper sound check with an excellent p.a. and sound technician while the Knights of harmony, who would be confined to their dressing room once the show began, taking the chance to listen to us and cheer us on.  We likewise took the chance to watch Steel, Miss Demeanour and the Knights of Harmony all do their sound checks.  This is a kind of music which I am very unfamiliar with - other than seeing it on films in my youth.  So, it was a real treat to see it up close and in colour!  There is so much skill in those arrangements and harmonies.

As the time for the show approached, we retreated to the green room feeling more than slightly under-dressed for the occasion.  This was a proper show with co-ordinated suits and things!  However, no-one seemed to mind.  We watched the Knights and Miss Demeanour perform on the TV provided in the green room.  We then tip-toed to the back of the stage and, with military precision and the very kindest of words from the MC, were brought on stage to do our first 15 minute slot, which seemed to go down very well – ours were the only instruments played all evening, the rest was all acapella.  Then Steel came on, wearing their national medals, and took the concert to a rousing first half end.

Following the break, a slightly different order was adopted but we did a further well appreciated 15 minutes, retreated to the green room to watch the rest of the show.   We then returned to the stage to re-join with all of the other acts for the grand finale – a song called The Irish Blessing. Thankfully, we had had an earlier rehearsal of this, new-to-us song and, as such, we did a better job of joining in than John Redwood, the former Tory Minister did when caught on telly trying to sing the Welsh National Anthem when he was Secretary of State for Wales.

After the show, as is the tradition with barber Shop concerts, Steel and Miss Demeanour did some further song renditions in the theatre bar amongst members of the audience. This is something that is known in Barber Shop circles as the ‘afterglow’ – which seems a very apt term for that time after a good live performance.  To join in with the spirit of the evening, Rob and I did a few extra danzas.

There was genuine interest all night from the most genuine of people in our music and instruments. We also saw some good CD sales and gathered a few names for our mailing list.  This was a really lovely experience and we are very very grateful to all at the Knights of Harmony for giving us such a night to remember, and we hope they will remember us  too for our contribution to what a truly excellent event.

A Toast to Friends and Family, 

Readifolk, the Reading Folk Club, is one of our favourite clubs.  The organisers, Una and Colin and their friends on the Committee, have consistently been generous to us, giving us an early showcase and one of our first full, ‘headliner’ gigs.  So, it was with great pleasure that we set off on Sunday evening to go and visit the club in the RISC centre in central Reading.  The pleasure was doubled for me because my daughter, now living in Reading, was coming along with friends, plus some of our very closest and longstanding friends had also said they were coming along.

The last time Rob and I had been to Readifolk it had been a wintry night in February 2009, with snow threatening, and (not surprisingly) a few regulars staying at home.  Tonight was different.  The club was pretty full by the time the proceedings began.  The evening began with compere Ian and friend doing some amusing self-penned material to liven up the audience.  The hilarity was then taken up a notch with the next performer, a young woman, performing Captain Coulston.  It being a pirate song, she had brought along a toy parrot with an internal microphone to repeat everything she said.  Very amusingly, the switch on the parrot then broke and its mimic function couldn’t be turned off.  After a few minutes of great hilarity, the parrot had to be put out of the room – but friends tell me that, for the whole first half, it could be heard replaying bits of na-mara, as we went through our paces.  (Does that mean double PRS?) At half time, some electronic evisceration was administered – the parrot, like a slaughtered chicken, was eventually brought back into the room– with its battery in the owner’s other hand.  Ouch! 

The second half kicked off with some good floorspots, including a fitting and rightful tribute to the recently deceased Bert Jansch. 

After good nights at Barton and St Neots, Rob and I were well rehearsed and raring to go.  We played a full range from our repertoire in both halves and the audience responded very warmly to it all.  In the second half, we again took the chance to further embed The English Penny and The Silver Duro into the repertoire. Readifolk likes a good sing and they really helped make The English Penny a special moment.

Once again, it was nice to be asked to play an encore, which we were happy to oblige with Three Bonny Ships. Compere Ian then closed the night with some very kind words about our performance, for which we thank him. Time allowed me to quickly catch up with friends and family, before setting off home.  Rob bought me a little cool bag for my recent enty-enth birthday. So, the slightly chilled bottle of Hook Norton Gold in the car on the home was very welcome after a lovely (but very warm) evening with Readifolk.  We are already looking forward to going back to the club and fervently hope it won’t be too long.

We are still working on the video material we have been capturing on recent gigs.  Once we have them, we will send out notification.

On the 5th we were off to Ross Scrivener's folk club at The Bull in Barton-le-Clay. We always enjoy playing at Barton and, given this was a mixed guest night and ‘sing around the room session’, it was an informal setting to play on. In addition to catching up with some old friends at the club, the evening gave us the chance to introduce a couple of new tunes that we are keen to get into the repertoire (a Breton Gwerziou coupled with a new danza - the Danza Quiemada).  We also reprised The Maid of Culmore, which we haven’t played for ages.  There were some lovely songs sang around the room and Ross sang a very lovely song about his father’s time in the Navy in the Second World War.