Following our performance at the Southwell Folk Festival last year, the organisers of the Carrington Triangle Folk Club in Nottingham invited us to play for them in early 2012, which we were naturally very excited to do. The trip was made even more interesting when organiser, Martin Smalley, organised a visit for us to talk on the Alan Clifford early evening programme on BBC Radio Nottingham.
Readers of this blog will rightly guess that this was our furthest trip north to play a folk club. Both of us were very keen to prepare properly for the trip. So, we both organised to take a day’s leave from work, do some recording and rehearsal in the morning, and then set off in good time just to ensure the M1 didn’t have any tricks up its sleeve to play on us.
As it turned out, we arrived in very good time, parked up near the radio station and went for a cup of coffee. As there was a chance that we would be playing live on the programme, we later returned to the car to start unloading instruments. At this point a local ‘character’ popped up out of nowhere to enquire if we were in a band, were we going on the radio, what sort of band, could he be in the band and were we playing any songs for the recently deceased Whitney Houston? – ‘yes, yes, folk, no and no’. He then followed us into the radio station for ‘a bit of a warm’.
Martin Smalley joined us for the interview with Alan Clifford and it was nice to have someone with experience in with us. In the end, we all decided it was easier just to play a couple of tracks from The Bite and talk about the music, rather than set up to play live.. Like nearly all media journalists, Alan was very intelligent and quick and, even though his show was generalist, clearly knew a lot about folk and roots music. He gently coaxed from us the background to our music, and the experience was very good.
We then followed Martin through late Nottingham rush hour traffic to have a meal with him and his wife, prior to heading off to the club. This gave us a good chance to catch up on the local Nottingham Folk scene over an excellent bowl of pasta!
Then we set off for the club, which is held in a room over a wonderful old pub, The Gladstone Inn on Loscoe Road. Immediately I walked in the door, I met up with my brother who had very kindly travelled down from Leeds to come and see us perform. He has all the CDs and is always keen to hear what we are up to, but hadn’t ever been able to see us play. This time, we were close enough for him to be able to make it for a club performance and it was great to see him in the audience later.
We all went upstairs to a nicely proportioned room to get tuned up and the usual pre-performance preparations, while the club filled up. I’m pleased to say that we had a full room by the time proceedings began, and the evening was great fun. The club has a wide range of excellent performers - unaccompanied, duos, and trios, all covering a wide range of musical styles.
We appeared to go down well, sold quite a few CDs, which is always a ‘vote of confidence’ in the evening, and played through until closing. We didn’t travel with p.a., so we were able to pack up reasonably quickly and, after saying goodbyes to my brother and to Martin, Marion and other club organisers, we hit the road. We had had an offer of accommodation. However, we are both ‘home birds’ really and Rob had work the next day but not me, thank goodness.