The Watford Folk Club is a welcoming folk club with excellent floor singers, a history of nurturing emerging acts and a growing reputation for putting on top quality music evenings. They have always been hugely supportive of na-mara and we love playing there. It is a listening and singing audience which suits our style perfectly.
With a format of two halves, each starting with club regulars performing floor spots followed by the main act, the wealth of talent in the club was illustrated by the fact there was only sufficient time for a single contribution from each floor singer. How grand then, in a wonderful mix of renditions and styles, to have three of my favourite songs performed in one evening by three different sets of performers, Raglan Road , Lord Franklin (performed by Alison Raymond and Kim Olyett) and Eric Bogle’s The Band Played Waltzing Matilda - sung with great feeling on the 100th Anniversary of that truly horrendous battle. Other excellent numbers were performed by Dave Auld, Linda Birmingham and Julian Mount, Liz Lawley and a host of others.
For ourselves, we played a mixture of tracks from our new CD, Navajos & Pirates, our new song The Black Widows, Scots favourite Time Wears Awa’ and a ‘re-mixed’ version of Maid of Culmore, this time using DADGAD tuning.
The arrival of members of a morris team during the half time break later contributed to a wonderful and spontaneous outbreak of dancing in the second half of the evening as we played our up-tempo version of French classic Compagnons de la Marjolaine. As performers, we really love it when something like that happens. Thanks to Linda Birmingham for leading this.
The feedback from the evening was excellent with lots of audience members thanking us for both our music and our stories. Many thanks to Pete Nutkin and his fellow committee members at Watford Folk Club. We thank them for their invitation to play, and we wish them well for the remainder of 2015 and hope their 2015 song competition, on the theme of Lovers and Losers, proves every bit as popular and as full of quality as previous years’ competitions have done!