Loughton Folk Club is a well run, highly active, and welcoming place to play. It has a fine room upstairs at the Loughton Club which manages to accommodate a good number of people without losing any of the intimacy needed for folk music. Run by John Hart and others, it has always been supportive of our music and has an excellent track record of embracing artists from nearby areas as well as more established, national, artists. It also has a proud record of fund raising through its ‘nights of protest’ and other events.
As readers of our blog will know, we like to get to gigs early and this approach proved a lifesaver for our night at Loughton Folk Club; the motorway traffic was atrocious and, if we had set out any later, it could have been a concern. However, mercifully the log jam eased and we still managed to get to the club in sufficient time to set up before most club members arrived.
The banter in the Loughton Folk Club is always excellent, the atmosphere is very friendly and, in our experience, the quality of performances by club regulars is consistently high and so it proved once more the night we visited including performances by, amongst others, John Hart himself and by the wonderful Steve O’Donoghue (whom I am a big fan of).
We were supported on the evening by the newly formed trio called TRED. Whilst it was true that the band had only just formed and this might have been their first ever performance, but its individual members were all very experienced and highly talented, counting among their number David Delarre of Mawkin fame. Excellent musicians all, they played some great tune-sets and I think we can be confident of hearing more of them in the months and years ahead.
Our own also sets went down very well and, at the end of the evening, MC John Hart said he felt confident he would be waking up the following day with our song ‘Navajos and Pirates’ in his head. Much to our delight, the audience at Loughton also seemed more than happy to join us on a wide range of choruses and, as is often the case, we received some excellent feedback from audience members about how intrigued they were by the stories we tell in song.
Many thanks to John, Jennie and all the organisers and club members at Loughton Folk Club, and all best wishes to Steve O’Donoghue, the other club singers at Loughton and to TRED.