Friday 18th June 2010
Well here we are again. 3 days to Midsummer. In the middle of the festival season. Lots of gigs and events going on. As I sit here listening to Home-to-tea Girl by Roaring Jelly (now Omega 3) I am reflecting on the fortunes of the sessions. Catch them if you can by the way, they’re a fantastically silly and entertaining outfit. Omega 3 that is.
I don’t know if it’s the weather or what but the Irish session is rising phoenix-like from the rather grim times earlier. A lot of it due to hard work by sessioneers like Six-String-Shelagh and some of it is due to great good fortune and Facebook. Whatever the reason it is a real pleasure to see 10 or more playing at the George and more people coming to listen as well.
Not Strictly Session (A BBC Commission I wonder?) but I felt it was worth mentioning. I was invited to join Watershed for a barn dance last Saturday as one of their irregulars and I was most taken with the location and venue. Normally, the prospect of a barn dance in an actual barn fills the band with horror. Visions of a frayed 13 amp cable looping in from somewhere, freezing wind whistling in through the slats in the side, some kind of surface which is guaranteed to create a hovering miasma of what can be best described as recycled organic matter which not only obscures the dancers but also coats the equipment in a dust which Iceland would be proud of. I have heard tell that it’s still inside some mixing desks after 12 years or more – impossible to shift.
However, this was a lambing shed in the wilds of the Weald and it was a beautiful evening. The kind of place where sat navs give up and the road has grass down the middle and you pray you don’t meet a tractor. The shed had only 3 sides being open to a field which sloped gently down before rising again to some trees beyond which was the village with a lazily smoking chimney. The shed had a straw floor and bales for seats. It shouldn’t have been good but it was. It was somehow a complete feeling of continuance with the past. Being so rural and near midsummer (bonfires were prepared and lit at midnight) with communities celebrating with drink and food and dance it was just magic. Real magic.
Of course if it had been raining it would have been different …..