What a pleasure it was last night to get involved with a burgeoning new folk club, The White Horse Folk Club in Hertford. With the help of a very sympathetic and supportive publican, club organiser and well-known local folk musician Pat Crilly has done a wonderful job in getting this lovely club up and running.
The club is held in an upstairs room in the truly delightful White Horse Pub on Castle Street. (Rob and I don’t drink when we perform but both of us very much fancy returning to the White Horse for a few beers one night!). The club room provides a really intimate environment in which to perform, with audience members in close proximity helping to build what is an intimate atmosphere.
In addition to Pat’s own considerable talents, he has managed already to bring together some accomplished local performers to play at the club regularly. Pat dipped into his own encyclopaedic repertoire to entertain with songs both poignant and funny, and other club members treated the audience to an excellent mix of self-penned and traditional material. The banter around the room was excellent as was the willingness of audience members to join in on choruses.
For ourselves, we played two thirty-minute sets, both of which seemed to be very well appreciated, and it was nice to talk about the songs and tunes with audience members at the break and at the close of the evening. We delivered good renditions of the two latest additions to the set list, a self-penned song and a Qubecois translation, and they are really bedding well into our set now.
Finally, it was really nice to see that various friends of na-mara had travelled from across the county to come and join us in Hertford. It is both touching and a real fillip to look up and see familiar faces in the audience.
Many thanks to Pat for the invitation and to all the members of The White Horse Folk Club in Hertford. We wish the club every success going forward.