The dark and drear October night upon which we set out, in no way presaged the sparklingly entertaining night we were to subsequently experience at the Oxford Folk Club. With the M25 gummed up with rain and Friday night traffic, it was hard driving for Rob as we went cross-country through the mini-roundabout capital of the world (Aylesbury) and on to the car parking desert that is Oxford. In the end, such was our luck that the evening commuters of Aylesbury appeared only to be hurtling around their roundabouts at half their usual pace and a car parking space miraculously opened up for us just outside The Folly Bridge Inn on only our second circuit of the ‘residents only’ parking locale. We should have bought our weekend lottery ticket then – our luck was clearly in.
This was our first time at the new venue for the Oxford Folk Club. The club has access to a nice sized room above a busy local pub. The atmosphere was warm and welcoming and, as we tuned up for our floor spot, we were conscious of more and more players arriving. The organisers were clearly both surprised and delighted at the number of new faces visiting them for an Open Night – they were even more surprised and delighted as this peripatetic talent one by one came up to play.
For example, sitting quietly in the audience was Stanley Accrington – who played two very funny pieces. However, like everyone else, such was the pressure that he (and we) and all the visitors only had time for two numbers. We had squeezebox/ bouzouki from Somerset, we had another guitar /mandolin duo from Newbury, we had a New York member of the Klezmatics (!!! yes, the Klezmatics) who just happened to be passing through Oxford before a concert in London the following night and who seamlessly knitted together a wonderful suite of fiddle tunes from across a whole range of different musical cultures. We even had a cowboy poet from Saskatchewan who was also passing through – who gave us insight into a night on the Prairies! We played our couple of numbers well and received some nice feedback from a number of those there, at the interval.
Along with the visitors, there was an excellent array of local club regulars. There were those who sang a cappella or were singer song-writers or sang classic traditional songs. There was also one very fine guitarist who played the Scots ballad, Mary Hamilton, in a highly original jazz-based style. Altogether, this made for a long and wonderfully rewarding evening of folk music.
Congratulations to the organisers of the Oxford Folk Club for orchestrating and managing a really fine evening of folk music.