On the road again....

And so we're back once more. 

Landed at Heathrow yesterday afternoon in a fog of sleeplessness and geographical dislocation. Immigration/customs (both official and strange local), then car, drive, hotel, food, shower, pillow slam.

Awoke to find the outskirts of Hounslow as inviting as ever.  Ah, Costa!

A long slow breakfast, slightly quicker packing of the car and then on our way.  Google said 6 and a bit hours so of course bank holiday Friday saw us arrive at Susan and Malcolm's just South of Alnwick Castle just shy of 11 hours after we left.  The sign that said "Queues Likely Until August 2015" seemed prescient.  An all-too-brief stop at Jacey and Brian's helped us to maintain reasonable caffeine levels.

Another bed beckoned but the lag of the jet sees me up and sort of about at the unfamiliar hour of 7 in the morning.

Slowly becoming used once more to the ways of the road.  

We settle in now for a for a spell of recovery, unsheathing the instruments and the employment of loin-girders for what lies ahead. 

More to follow.

John

A Typical Night at a Folk Club.

And here's a picture drawn on our mailing list!

A typical gig night for us goes something like this: first we spend the day aware that we have a gig, and trying not to wear ourselves out too early. We drive to the gig, which has been anything from half an hour to five hours' drive. After a long drive, Nic likes to have a little nap to get body and soul back together. This can be as short as 20 minutes, and often happens in the car. At this point John likes to read the Guardian. He says he could read forever and why isn't the Guardian bigger?

Then we go in search of a sustaining dinner and eat about 6.30pm. We both really need to eat before gigs, as the concentration uses up a lot of fuel. The food choices are limited by Nic's inability to eat onion, and some places that we know are excellent in a hurry include Pizza Express (where they do a great salad with torn chicken, avocado, beans, egg, potatoes and some strips of cooked pizza dough), and Wetherspoons which is reliable and well priced. Sometimes we can eat at the venue, which is often a pub that does food.

If there is a p.a. for the gig, we go in to the venue early and set up our gear, say hello to the organisers, and do a sound check. When there is a p.a., Nic uses her stomp box and flute microphone. We do line checks on everything and get the sound as clear as possible, so we can hear the vocals in particular. Clear vocal sound means we can sing in tune, hearing each other's harmonics.

Everything else gets a check, and the list includes concertina, guitar, percussion kit (tambourine on a stand played with brushes, cymbal), stomp box, wooden and silver flutes, whistle, fiddle. Nic has to make sure the shaker egg and f-whistle are in reach, not in a bag..... If there is no p.a., we set our gear up and check how resonant the room is, which dictates how much we need to face towards each other to hear.

Sometimes there is a support act who also sound checks, more often there is a selection of resident musicians from the club or floorsingers who have asked for a spot, and this starts the night. Residents and floorsingers often do amazing songs.

Then Cloudstreet is introduced, and we do our first 45 minute set. For us, 45 minutes is seven songs, with some chatter in between. If we try to squeeze more in, the show is not as relaxed and flowing. We like to start with a couple of songs that are very strong, so that people can relax into a good night, knowing we are safe up on that stage. We took this idea on from Kristina Olsen's performance notes, and its true, you don't want to worry that the performer up there is a bit shaky, you want to immerse yourself in the music they make.

We have been finishing the first half with Bill and the Bear, because its a good spot in the set for Nic to put on extra costume - that corset and tutu from Thailand have been getting a real workout! And it's an uplifting and fun song to take us to the break.

In the break we replenish our drinks, make sure the mailing list is passing round the room, talk to people about music, ideas, songs, sell them cds if they would like them, and give away postcards.

Then we're into set two, and it can be shorter or longer than set one, depending on the club's timing, but is usually another 45 minutes. We move our songs around each night, because we have more songs than we can perform in one night. We design the set to have a dynamic flow, changing pace, making sure we don't put two slow, thoughtful songs together, making sure we change key a lot to keep the ear fresh. We put in requests from the audience as much as we can, which sometimes redesigns the set completely!

There is often time for an encore, and we usually do something acapella as a way of rounding out the night.

Then there is a period of socializing and a few more cd sales, during which Nic tries to pack up her collection of instruments and not lose anything. At last night's club, the mailing list on a clipboard which we lost at Fylde festival over a month ago, was returned to us!

And we load the car, say farewell, and drive to the accommodation, slowly losing the adrenalin from our systems and getting tired. We usually get to bed between 1 and 2am, sometimes earlier, and try to get enough sleep to do it all again tomorrow!

News in from the last week: after the Red Lion we had the pleasure of staying with Vin and Pat Garbutt up on Teesside for a couple of nights, and found out just how comforting an Aga stove in the kitchen can be. Vin's discovered a new bird called the Great Grey Tunkle, so he's very pleased with himself.

From their place we went to do our gig at Guisborough, and we had trouble finding the venue (driving up and down the street going, no, not that building, what about that one), so we worried that no-one else would find it, but they did, and it was a great night with a singing club. The only worry was when Nic wore that tutu into the general bar, full of squash players, to buy a drink. "One of the singers, are yeh?" said a man at the bar, in a very understated way, glancing sideways.

We had a look round Saltburn, and Vin pointed out the chimney of the steelworks that made the steel for the Sydney Harbour Bridge, north at Redcar. We walked down the pier past the funicular railway and watched the brave surfers.

The drive from there to Southport was long, about 4 hours, but spectacular, as we drove over the high moors into Cumbria, on a sun and showers day with sunlight picking out glorious pieces of the view.

Southport is a fun place to go shopping, and we hit the charity shops next day and got some flash winter gear for the next few weeks. Not sure if it will come back to Australian summer with us. The Bothy Folk Club there is a beauty, wonderful resident musicians and a lovely room.

Next night we were in Runcorn, not too far away, at a club with a lot of heart, in a tiny venue where we played in front of the door. Once again, impressive resident singers led the way.

And we followed that with two nights with Dave and Linda, who used to live in Townsville, North Queensland, but happily for us, now live near Northwich! Nic had a walk down the cut and found a late fruiting damson tree to raid. We went from there to our show in Blackpool, at the Clarence. W

e have played there three times before, and its always a good night. Eddie does lovely sound and is a luthier. Last night Richard, the support act, was playing a most delectable guitar that Eddie made for him. Nic has tried Eddie's mandolins in the past and continues to covet one. He hasn't made any this year yet.

And now we prepare to drive to Maidenhead.

Skeletor the sheep, in Skipton, Nth Yorks.

A sign in the toilets at the motorway services.

Two muso, two clubs, two festivals, two days off.

I know all about driving while tired! Six hours from Glasgow to Birmingham, an extra hour because there was a car fire on the M6 and the whole motorway was stopped for 45 mins, so we broke our rule (always stay on the big blue roads even if they're really slow, because they're quicker than the little green roads. Make a cuppa. That's what the thermos is for) and diverted along A roads. Took forever. We were less stressed than we might have been, and practised cloudstreet songs as we drove along.

The last time we played at the Black Diamond in Birmingham, we were stopped midway through our third song by the fire brigade. It had just come to their attention that the folk club room, upstairs in the pub, didn't have proper fire escapes, and they kicked us out! Undeterred, we did a deal with the dominoes players downstairs and squeezed the audience into a small downstairs room where we finished the show singing in the doorway. When we got to the club this time, everyone remembered the goings on of last time, and in a bid to tempt fate, we put that same song, Miner's Washing, second in the set just to see what would happen. But no firemen materialized and the gig went smoothly.

The next step, Birmingham to Wallingford, only took about 2.5 hours. Wallingford was fantastic, the first gig was in a sports club which had been recruited at the last minute when another venue fell through, and although there was a stage, p.a. and lights, it wasn't set up as a venue, and people were in dribs and drabs around the walls, or walking in, looking at the uninviting room and leaving again. There was also a rugby game going on outside.

I spoke to the MC, and when the act on stage finished, John and she and I zoomed around and set up 6 rows of seats in front of the stage, and it made the hugest difference to how the audience behaved. We then removed a few tables and chairs further back in the room to discourage groups from sitting and chatting at the back, and it worked well. The next act went on and people moved up to the chairs and listened. By the time we went on, we had a full crowd and people were creating more rows of chairs themselves. I knew they'd get the idea if we but showed them the way....

Our set was fun, a number of fans from our mailing list showed up, and some whole families who were fans. We sold a few cds afterwards, then hurried off to soundcheck for our next gig. It was in a church in the centre of town. The church had been refurbished inside to let in lots of light, and it was the most perfect singing environment. They used a p.a., but only to lightly boost the sound. Did the soundcheck, which took a while, then found a Pizza Express, a particularly reliable and delicious restaurant chain. Not cheap, but worth it.

Got totally costumed up for that one, tutu, corset, the works. The cameras came out when we walked on. The sound was so perfect in there, we were singing into condenser mics, and I could hear so clearly, we could play around with the dynamics in a way that is often impossible. Wonderful! Stayed to the end of the next act, our agent's band, Artisan. By that I mean, she sings in it, as well as being our agent. In fact, she seems to have taken on all our friends lately, so Isambarde and Vicki Swan and Jonny Dyer are all now on Jacey's books, plus a troupe of Zulu singers and dancers, all of whom were playing this festival. Artisan's harmony blend was sublime, delicious three part harmony and firmly tongue in cheek banter.

We had an accommodation malfunction at this festival, and so did the guys from Isambarde. The room we were offered actually had no bed at all. Although there were camp beds in other rooms, we weren't confident two of them would have our names on them by the time we managed to return to the room, so John talked to some people and managed to secure a billet for us.

Wallingford was full of friends and we caught up with lots of musicians after our show, including lovely Leeds songwriter Tom Bliss, and Chris, Em and Jude from Isambarde. 

We were up at 6 next morning, left at 7 and drove for nearly 5 hours to get to the next gig, Fylde Festival in Lancashire. Sunday morning, the traffic wasn't too bad, but it was a long drive. We took turns driving and napping. Got there, got wristbands, put flyers on every second seat in the main theatre, then went to our first gig in the hotel bar. Big crowd, big Balkan band on before us, did a quick set up and had a very breezy chat with the audience throughout the gig. So glad this low key gig was our first job, it warmed up those tired voices and made a strong connection with the audience which carried through to our later and much more formal gig on the main stage. We hurried over to the Marine Hall after the first gig, and soundchecked very efficiently. Had a dressing room here and everything!

And finally, we got to see our great friends Jonny and Vicki. We've been here nearly a month, we've stayed in their house, but this was the first time we'd laid eyes on them. They are two of my best friends in the world. And they were playing with another dear friend, George Papavgeris, who has toured in Australia a couple of times. They mainly do George's songs, as his band. Vicki plays double bass and flute in this lineup, and Jonny plays lead/rhythm guitar, piano accordion and piano. They also do harmonies. George had teed up with us to come on and do several songs with them, and this meant we had to be totally ready for our set before they started. John was nervous. I was not, but I made sure I was very organised. We walked on during the second verse of George's song "Friends Like These" and joined in the chorus. George knows about symbolism.

Our gig went like a dream, sound was good, vibe was good, we were relaxed. Bill and the Bear is going down a storm with audiences, and my drumming is improving, I think. For the last song we did Green Man, and we asked George, Jonny and Vicki to come up and play. So we did it with guitar, bass, accordion and 5 voices. It was big.

We sold lots of cds afterwards, we actually had a queue!

And then we stayed in the hotel from the dawn of time... it was like Fawlty Towers. Inexplicable architectural features (enter the door of your room, and you are faced with the end of a wall, weirdly dividing two doorless rooms), slow service, super-creaky floors, pathetic shower, a drop of blood on the wall, filthy carpet, three televisions, no space. There were two single beds in each tiny room. It turned out I got the firmest bed. John came back later than me and said he actually giggled when he lay on his bed, it was just like a hammock. The hotel was very convenient for the venues, though!

The last time we played Fylde, we stayed in single rooms in the Nautical College, and they were austere but very clean. I liked them better.

So after two days of recovery in Yorkshire, tonight we play in Nottingham, and we're singing on the radio this afternoon!