Friday 21 December 2012

On Wednesday night Alasdair and I were doing our ballads thing in front of a packed and extremely attentive audience at the Glad Café, which was hard work and enormous fun. We’d hoped that The Crying Lion (or ‘Trembling Picnic’) were going to open the show, but at least two of the four succumbed to one of the many viruses that’s around at the moment, so instead Alex brought his drum kit and did free improv for about 40 minutes while Lucy Stein projected her live paintings onto him and the screen behind.

This loosened the audience up nicely for our sequence of traditional ballads, most of which have a lot of verses and involve killing of some description, and some of which have me playing only one (non-tertial) chord all the way through, but (I hope) making it interesting in other ways instead. A folk music audience expecting toe-tapping tunes and craic would have been in shock I think.

Anyway, the Glad Café’s wee upright piano was fun to play, and Joe and the crew there deserve your support: it’s a great place. Most of the folks were drinking Williams Bros beer, Luke Fowler guessed what school I went to within about a minute of saying hello, which shows him to be disturbingly perceptive, and I now have an advance promo copy of Alasdair’s new album which is a very rich piece of work, worth the money for his artwork and lyrics even before you put it on.