A Sunday night trip to Twickfolk to support Jez Lowe - what a nice way to start the year’s ‘gigging’! Having spent many hours in quiet rooms finishing the mixing and mastering of our new CD ‘Navajos & Pirates’, it was good to get back to rehearsals and performing. A straightforward trip round the North Circular to a club we have long admired, was an ideal way to begin our 2015 schedule of gigs.
We arrived in good time to the club and saw firsthand the efforts that Twickfolk’s dedicated team of volunteers put in to getting the club ready for an evening’s performance. Albeit still at its historic home of The Cabbage Patch pub on London Road in Twickenham, the club now has an excellent new space within the building, with a great stage and excellent sound system, and the team was hard at work making sure everything was alright for the night.
Arriving early allowed us not only to have a good sound check but also to reintroduce ourselves to Jez Lowe whom we had supported at the Baldock and Letchworth Folk Club some years previous. Naturally, we congratulated him on his nomination for the Best Original Song at the BBC Folk Awards for 2015 and, in the time available, managed to have an extremely pleasant discussion with him about his touring workload and our mutual friends and acquaintances. Speaking from experience, not every headliner artist is as welcoming and open as Jez and it was both instructive and a real pleasure to talk with him.
In terms of performance, we introduced a winter-honed addition into our set for the evening - a much reworked version of Compagnons de la Marjolaine - and generally kept everything upbeat and lively. This seemed to work well. Organisers and audience members seemed appreciative of what we did and were very complimentary when we spoke to them afterwards.
Not surprisingly, Jez had attracted a big audience and he put on a great show, full of his trademark interesting and poignant songs.
Twickfolk is an excellent and well supported folk club and we sincerely hope we can return to the club in 2016 and show its members a little more of what we can do.