Sat 17 Mar – The Blend Festival

An eclectic evening with a mixture of Balkan marches and dance tunes, a Chain Gang work song, a couple of Ragas (one of which was Ghandi's favourite apparently) a Bach piece mixed in with some limericks / poems such as the "Doctors Lament". Mark Pavey provided support and then joined Davy towards the end of the gig.

On some of the recordings I haven't been that happy with his singing but I think his voice sounds even better with age.

If you get a chance go see him play.

ps
Is it Davey…

Just cos I'm doing my best to learn this song by memory is all. Bless my iPod. Only problem is I can't remember the words and the chords at the same time, so practice practice….

Hats off to Eric Idle btw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44DlSj6bnn4&feature=player_embedded#!

And here is our Harpic's take on it…
The Harpic version

Just noticed that my top track artist has after all this time since I joined Audioscrobbler / LastFM, changed from Roy Harper, Commune to Nick Harper's, The Verse Time Forgot

Roy Harper
Nick Harper

Roy read this out just before he sings "I Hate the White Man" or maybe after he's sung it not sure which I still have to nail down which album it is on. It is also on a bootleg recording The Red Lion Folk Club Birmingham 1984 Show 2 but I was positive it was on an offical album as well but having rummaged around twice now I think my old brain cell is acting up.

Apparently the poem is from a book of native American verse called 'Touch the Earth'. As Roy says the piece below is by Alleek-chea-ahoosh…

What a hoot the show was!

Nick as he put it himself was "blootered" due to having in-bided some of the amber nectar during the day/evening and so we had a very entertaining time with various ramblings, discussions about what we wanted him to play next etc plus obligatory string break/replacement. Nick's guitar seemed to be a bit drunk at some points as the tuning was going a bit wayward at points :-)

I unfortunately put my proverbial size nines in it even before things got started. We were walking down the corridor to where Nick would be playing and…

Can you believe it I travelled through to Glasgow to meet up with my daughter and we couldn't find a decent pub prior to the gig! I mean we were in Glasgow, if you can't get a decent pint in Glasgow there is summit seriously wrong!

We eventually decided to make do with Bud Var's at King Tut's. Quiet a large contingent of student types plus a few crumblies / Roy Harper types (like me although I was wearing a better jumper than a couple of the other bearded ones) :)

At 8:30pm the doors opened but we weren't for…

Went to see Steve Lawson for the first time on Thursday with my mate James, on the recomendation of a fellow Stormcocker http://www.mistlethrush.co.uk/stormcock/ Catherine W.

The show was titled Bass the Final Frontier Once the lights went down we heard the strains of the original (Captain Kink) Star Trek theme tune being played on what I thought was a small kids keyboard but turned out to be Steve's mobile phone :)

Steve was explaining how annoying mobile phones were particularly when they ring in the middle of his gigs at which my genius of a mate James remembered he hadn't…