With
John Kearney the featured Artiste, a quality evening at last night's
Folk Festival Fund Raiser at Bedworth Rugby Club was assured. I mused on
this, as I drove across the eerie Lunar Landscape of the car park towards the clubhouse.
Was it just bad weather and subsidence which had made the surface
deeply cratered like this ? Or was it the constant banging of generations of scrum
halves and prop forwards' heads, exercising their craniums after 80 minutes of mauls scrums and line outs? In some weird
after match frenzy between " I am The Music Man" and the Toilet Block
eating contest? Got to be a song in there somewhere.
Three
members of the Black Parrot Seaside Ensemble which had so royally
entertained The Tump a week exactly a week ago were present. It is
indicative of the fluidity of musical collaborations in N.E.
Warwickshire that each one of us last night performed, but
separately.
First came Malc
Gurnham who as compere and Festival organiser, led us off on an evening
which would prove to be...well...diverse. With Gill Gilsenan, the two of them
opened with some nice chorus songs before Joe Roberts was unleashed.
Joe's first song was a Don Gibson one, I think. One is never entirely
sure, until round about three quarters of the way through any Joe
song, of what the old buzzard is actually up to. Last night his
second contribution was heavily disguised until it finally appeared that he was giving an entirely unique slant on an old Slade
song. I think it was “Come on Feel The Noise,” but I'm not
entirely certain. I don't remember that many choruses in the original,
and the lyrics seemed well...different somehow.
Sometime Parrot Dave Parr followed,
this time accompanying Cyder Annie instead of us. They produced a couple of nice arrangements
of old songs for us too. “ Goodnight Irene,” got the
whole company crooning the choruses nostalgically, although Annie also
was quite innovative on some of the verse variations. Phil Benson
then exorted us all to join him, as he was apparently going “Down
to the River to Pray.” Quite how he would achieve that in
Beduff, I'm not sure. The nearest river is the Anker, and if he
wanted to baptise anyone in it, he'd have to haul the supermarket
trolleys out of it first.
I
then did a solo spot. “ Down Our Street “ had its third
outing in a week and so can no longer be considered brand new. I
still have to use a song sheet as a prompt, but last night I'd stood a
pint on it beforehand and the lyrics had gone all runic smears. There's a lesson
for us all- use a beermat. “ Salt of The Earth “ followed, and I
finished up with “ The Gravy Train.” All enthusiastically sung
along with by a willing audience. Joe even helpfully provided some of the filler
instrumentation here, bridging verses and choruses with some pretty good
humming. It's frightening how much memory attention he has when it
comes to music.
John
Kearney's daughter Roisin then entertained us with some fine flute
instrumentals. Sue Sanders had arrived late (no note again-naughty
girl!) and followed Roisin by unleashing some further instrumentals.
Nifty fiddle playing, with Malc accompanying her. I'm surprised he
doesn't get mixed up sometimes, with all the personnel variations he
has to adapt to.
This
concluded the first half. We had a hasty raffle and poor old Gill,
who had been suffering with an ENT infection, folded the tickets, did
the draw and then staggered off to a warm bed with a Hot Toddy.
Whoever Toddy may be. Seriously, Get well soon, Gill!
It was left to
Malc to kick the second half off on his own. He gave us a gem, with
what he claimed was the first song he ever sang in a Folk Club. This
was an early Stone's song, “You Better Move On.” One of
my own favourites, in the days long ago when I had hair. Malc gave it
a very original treatment and this thwarted me, as I was unable to
fill in with the eerie backing vocals which are a hallmark of this
early E.P. Song.
It's hard to believe that for Malc, (who first
recorded on Wax Cylinder, remember, who once met Gilbert and Sullivan and who had famously composed a tune to celebrate just after the Relief of Mafeking),
this Early 'Stones material was his first public performance.
Follow that, John Kearney! And he did,
inimitably. He worked professionally through a mix of sad, angry and
funny songs, which was all the more impressive with him having
confessed to us all that he'd wiped his original set list of the
computer last night. We had a good old singalong and a good old
think. John always clearly enjoys performing and his enthusiastic
delivery is infectious. We had the Everleys, fond reminiscence of
Cork's erstwhile traffic management schemes, a haunting song about
911, some more Leadbelly ( Malc met him, too) and some more original compositions. All in
all, it was a Corking night. (See what I did there, John?)
