We first come across the NAF Club when it was featured in the excellent Herts., Beds., Bucks. and Cambs. local area folk magazine, Unicorn Magazine. Located in Silsoe in central Bedfordshire and run by Ned Lawton of the very friendly and very talented music trio, Ragged Staff, the club’s name lays out its intentions clearly, namely, to provide a local venue for acoustic music beyond just the folk genre. The full name for the club is the NAF (Not a Folk) Club.
Having recently moved to The Star and Garter pub in Silsoe High Street, it was our honour to be invited to perform as the club’s very first headliners in its new venue. The club has been given an nice, intimate, room upstairs in the pub and, to support the opening evening, the landlord laid on lots of tasty grub at half-time.
We arrived early and tuned up. Ned turned up shortly after and the room then filled quickly. Despite it being a bitterly cold night outside, the room was cosy and full with performers and audience by the time the evening got underway.
True to its name, club members ably and readily covered a wide range of acoustic music genres in the floor spots, and one talented young man provided a couple of moving pieces on his new Gibson electric. It was also great to see Ragged Staff play live. They are in the middle of a busy period of gigging themselves currently and were on fine form deploying a mighty array of instruments to very good effect.
We enjoyed performing our two sets and took the opportunity to introduce more of the material we have been developing over the winter. This included Scots song, ‘Time Wears Awa’ which we first heard from the singing of Alison McMorland (who, in turn, learned it from Willie Scott). We also played for the first time in public our new self –penned song called ‘The Black Widows’. This tells the story of a murderous pair of sisters who were hanged in Liverpool in the late 19th century for fraudulently taking out multiple insurance policies on husbands and other family members, and then using arsenic soaked from fly paper to slowly poison them. Both songs seemed to go down very well, and we were pleased with our renditions of them.
Thanks very much to the Ned Lawton and all at the NAF Club for the honour of being invited to open their new venue. We feel sure the club will have many great nights there. We wish the club and Ragged Staff well and sincerely hope our paths cross again with theirs in the not too distant future.