After a brief hiatus for holiday and other commitments, it was great to be back out performing again and where better to visit than with our old friends at Barnet Folk Club. We had originally been booked to play at the club back in May as a London launch for our Navajos & Pirates album. However, owing to a close bereavement at that time we had been forced to cancel. Very kindly, club organiser JJ Dunne had re-jigged his arrangements for the latter part of the year to accommodate us – for which many thanks!
Folk in the Foyer, the moniker of the Barnet Folk Club, does ‘what it says on the tin’. The foyer of the arts depot building at Tally Ho corner in North Finchley is regularly transformed on a Friday into a folk club in cafe style, with a stage at the front and a well stocked bar at the back. JJ organises a good p.a. set up which turns an otherwise potentially intimidating space into a convivial club atmosphere for the evening, offering entertainment to folk enthusiasts and newcomers in the local area.
We arrived in good time for a sound check with the club’s excellent sound engineer, Ben. Then, as JJ and fellow musician Rick Hayter went through their sound checks, the audience space filled up and, indeed, by 8.30pm the club was pleasingly full.
JJ started the evening off with a couple of great songs from Christy Moore, including our favourite, Viva La Quinta Brigada. He followed this with a song of his own and finished his set off with a very lively rendition of Fairy Tale of New York which certainly got the audience singing along.
JJ then called Rick Hayter to the stage. For those unfamiliar with his work, Rick is a prolific and talented singer songwriter from north London. In his six song set he covered a wide range of topics in a range of musical styles. Check both JJ and Rick out on You Tube!
Then we took the stage for a single 45-minute set in which we showcased many of the songs from the new album and added in some newer material with, for example, a rendition of The Black Widows.
I’m pleased to report our performance seemed to go down well.
We then concluded the evening by accompanying JJ with a version of Whiskey in the Jar - the traditional way in which proceedings are brought to a close at Barnet Folk Club. It is nice to send people away singing.
The audience at Barnet Folk Club are very friendly, welcoming and supportive. They are also very interested in the subject matter behind our songs. So, it was nice after the show to help direct one audience member to where he might find out more about the Black Widows (so-called since, in Victorian times, they would multiply insure their husbands and then poison them) and to update another audience member on where the story behind our song The Garden of England (which looks at slavery in modern agriculture in England) had got to since we last played the song at the club.
Many thanks to JJ for another memorable night at Barnet Folk Club! We wish the club every success and we look forward to returning to the club in the future.