8 December 2024

Tunes and tipples

I’ve been on my musical travels again.

Last Sunday I headed down to east London for a performance of the 12 Silk Handkerchiefs production at Walthamstow folk club. Regular readers (hello, both of you!) will know that I’ve been involved with this for some years now, and it’s always great to bring the story of Hull’s “headscarf revolutionaries” to new audiences.

It required a drive there and back in a day, owing to various other commitments, so after having arrived home at 3am, I was straight out the next morning to do a bit of filming for a song by Hull musician Bernie Laverick that I’ve done some backing vocals on.

Hopefully on the resulting video you won’t be able to tell that I’d applied my make-up liberally with a trowel to hide my bleary eyes! Our correspondent Tim Nuttall, himself no stranger to hard graft, asked me where I found the time and energy to do stuff like this. To be honest I don’t think I possess either, but these things somehow just happen…

I’m looking forward to more musical exploits closer to home this month, including the Great Newsome Festivale on June 17, where I’ll be playing with Fiddlers’ Elbow. I know the name of the event is a pun on the brewery’s fabulous beer (absolutely not a desperate pitch for freebies), but I struggle to stop myself pronouncing it, somewhat pretentiously, “festiv-arley”, like it’s some sort of southern European avant-garde jazz extravaganza.

Also coming up is a series of concerts to mark Withernsea Ladies’ Choir’s 95th anniversary, more about which you can read next week, but I’ll be appearing in the June 24 show at St Patrick’s Church, Patrington. Watch this space!