The FaB Club!
Folk acoustic Club!
Next session: 18th March...
25th March: Club in the pub
with Adrian Nation and
with review by Mick and Nora
“Play That Folky Music, White Hart Boy (And Girl)”
Fab Club Review - 4th March 2007
Well it’s 4th March 2007 and, after two successive (and successful) sessions in the big wide world - well, outside in the main bar anyway - it’s time to get back in the old routine and take over the back room.
It’s worth the observation that FaB has matured significantly since the move down here; the number of acts seems to have expanded to meet the increased frequency of the Club sessions, and even today (with at least half a dozen out of our - what can I say? Best? Most welcomed? Most appreciated? - acts missing) we have a mixed bag of skills, styles, influences and contents more than sufficient to fill a mild spring afternoon.
We’ve actually drawn about two dozen people for this particular session with the Fab Club jukebox, and with the usual slightly dodgy level of discussion, content and general moral tone (as well as an usual crop of FaB legends, traditions and in-jokes), it’s time to get under way.
Debbie is our compere for the day and marshals the troops just before 3.00 p.m. She makes the first of several references to this having been described as a ‘more intimate’ session - what will the readership on the Internet think? Google this page in two weeks time and we’ll see...
Passing that by, she introduces -
Gordon - oops, that’s me! OK, what have we got? Well between us Debbie and I trundle out Hard to be Humble - which gives me the chance to revive the old gag about what happens if you sing a country song backwards (and for anyone who didn’t know, the consequences are that your wife still loves you, your dog comes back to life, and you find yourself in gainful employment!). And a very dodgy accent, sadly.
The Sat Nav Song - is accurately described as a typical Gordon strum, detailing assorted misadventures with the eponymous device. If there’s any sort of award for getting ‘pizza’ and “Srebednicza’ into the same sentence, I’ve got to be in with a shout...
Bernard - and with a clashing change of gear, Bernard makes his entrance having exchanged his one oversized wellie and big organ (cue more gags about the intimate venue) for a squeeze box of some sort - and I’m afraid my usual blindspot for the differences between squeeze boxes, accordions, organs, and concertinas strikes again - sorry Bernard! He plays it well, whatever I get to call it, and delivers two complex and sprightly medleys.
Help, we’re under attack by traditional folk. I’m sorry I’ll read that again - by traditional folk MUSIC (phew!). The second medley leads off with each line flourishing the traditional and characteristic grace note which always sounds to me as if the player has been prodded with a sharp stick. Well played and well received.
Maureen - complains that the response to her anecdotes is in danger of getting her thrown out of the Scouts - why not the Guides? I’m confused - and meanwhile she’s been struck down with a cold, but still delivers Ducks - a cautionary tale about misadventures in Heaven - and Why Do Men Pee Standing Up. Oh well, there goes the moral standard again. We shall say no more in case Brown Owl gets browned off.
Norman - tries to confuse us by changing from his usual ukelele to a nylon strung guitar and comes up with a couple of Cliff Richard songs from the late 1950s, namely
When the Girl In Your Heart is the Girl of Your Dreams and a medley of Travelling Light/Living Doll.
He finds a lightish voice which carry the songs comfortably, and the guitar provides for a level and competent backing without the uppity and characteristic jangle of the ukelele. Where do we get all these versatile people from?
Joe straps himself into a dodgy looking leather contraption in order to play another squeeze box/accordion.type thing - same apology (see above) for my incipient word blindness, sorry, I’m getting old - and plays what he calls an experimental Buddy Holly track called Take Your Time. Joe’s voice still has those resonant Ian Anderson overtones and the experiment is well and truly successful.
Untangled from the contraption Joe dons a small Martin guitar and a set of steel fingerpicks for Coachman’s Whip - which is a traditional piece (traditional as per ‘heard in a bar in Camden Town’ - well, it works for me!) but catches up with the recent perceived trend for somewhat risque singing and with lines like ‘drove her ten times round the room’ (and others I’d blush to quote) well and truly kicks the propriety of the day into touch.
Dennis - unwraps a Martin guitar with a 1st fret capo, while telling the story of buying his first record and promptly dropping it on the concrete path - this of course being before the days of the indestructible CD. Not that he’s THAT old, but you don’t have to be in order to predate CDs...
He has brought along 2 pieces not delivered to the FaB audience before, and explains that of some 450 songs he has written over the years, there are only about 8 with which he is really happy as he has had to compromise the tunes in some way to adapt to his voice. Kites and Rainbows is one of the 8, all about flying kites on Hampstead Heath, also about childhood, naivety and the way in which we get cynical as we get older. Some lines go in like hooks - and “good intentions give way to excuses” is one of them - and the backing has some echoes of “Everybody’s Talking”.
For his second number, The Fable of the Scarecrow and the Windmill comes from a period when Dennis was writing fables - which are not now common this side of the channel. The song has a picking pattern reminiscent of Ralph McTell - from Harry Nilsson to Ralph McTell in four lines, how do we do it? - and has a chameleon like style with an edgy vocal. The point of the piece is that many things are a matter of perspective - each of the eponymous participants suffering from delusions but convinced they have the correct take on life.
All of which takes us very smoothly into the first break.
Break
And it looked just like that. We’re back and Debbie hushes the assembled two dozen to bring on the next 45 minutes or so and first of all it’s
Joe - who reappears with that same squeezebox/accordion and a song called The American King. It’s a traditional piece with strong dynamics and a snarling bass sound filling out like an orchestra. Next up is
Liz with two poems - On The Common Pond, written for her father (who was 90 at the time and is now 91), a dodgy driver whose career predated trivialities like driving licences). The piece reads like a biography and a testament to change - how different the cycles of work/war/work were in older days than our own.
The second piece is called Geological Soup and there is no description for a very mixed up multi aeonic melange like this. It’s hard to imagine everyone (and everything) coexisting like this - except maybe in a book - but I have to admit that I
love the vision of ‘primeval goop’. It sounds like something that Quatermass might have come up against - and if you remember THAT then we’re all getting too old - sorry, mature - for comfort...
Claudine leads off with her first song and I completely miss the title again, having been distracted by yet another FaB Club legend, being her Magic Jacket. For anyone who has joined us late, the Magic Jacket always has 5 plectrums in it as well as enough money for a round (£10), however late in the evening it is. It sounds like something that the heroine picks up in a game of Dungeons & Dragons as a necessary prerequisite to the main adventure, but how far that simile gets you in a suburban public house isn’t clear. Move on Gordon, move on.
Anyway, the song is written by Tim Almond and comes from the Either of Us canon, and it gets a light and almost spacey strum. Claudine’s voice is light and accepting as ever doesn’t so much carry the song as sweep over the top of it
She follows up with Gloria, an Anthony John Clarke song which is quite popular hereabouts, another reflective one and finger picked carefully to match. The chorus has a strategic switch from major to minor and the haunting couplet “Gloria’s out on the streets tonight/the only life Gloria knows” and it’s all very dark and serious.
Bill - and with another of those odd changes of gear, Bill sings acapella (well, accompanied by energetic stamping of the feet) and gets through a couple of songs which he says are now due for retirement but soon have the whole audience tapping along.
15 Times a Night - oh dear the standard’s slipped again - is something of a saga and narrates a nocturnal tryst (punctuated by numerous visits to - how do we put it - inspect the facilities) like you wouldn’t believe. And while we’re still reeling from THAT, I Am An Essex Boy strikes us down with a traditional )and comically stereotyped) view of Essex life - including variously vindaloo and Yorkshire Pudding, his girlfriend who reads meters for British Gas, and more audience participation (“oompah”) than you could shake the average Duryesque Rhythm Stick at.
Dennis returns to one of the odder introductions - “from an Essex boy to an East End boy”, and he raids his songbook for Love In A Mist, a reflective love song full of
gentle arpeggios which leaves everyone spellbound as usual. And it wouldn’t be a Gordon review without at least one mention of the legendary “ghost chorus” , which stirs into whispering life behind the song.
Gordon - Oh, I’m back again. What else can we dig out of the song book today? Well, we’ve got The End of Ward D1, which recounts one or two case histories from a stay in the now departed Oldchurch Hospital and is altogether too serious and gets followed by a rerun of an oldie Don’t Give Up The Day Job which gets people singing along and is altogether more jaunty.
Raffle
If I say that the prizes consist of Piglet, a bottle of wine and a salad bowl then you can consider which flavour of wine goes with pork while the rest of us go and have a -
Break
- before coming back for the legendary FaB Club Third Half.
Bernard - unleashes another instrumental piece and again I don’t catch the title because someone restarts the show when I’m not looking but it has the same lilting Irish overtones as before. He takes two goes at getting it spot on but the outcome is pretty cool.
Maureen consults her book of anecdotes and liberates a piece called Brokeback Mountain - no, not that one - with a conclusion that I should have seen coming and which I’m sure that dates back to the days of Lady Penelope and Parker - well, I’m sure that’s where I heard it first!
Norman has gone back to the ukelele and claims that his next song is hampered by his ability to play the solo and not the song. The piece in question is Hindu Howdo Whodo Youdo Man which is as bouncy as ever, includes backbeats and polyrhythms in the solo - and he plays the song around the solo as well!
Liz opens up with a story about her problems with an American GPS (winding up stuck halfway up an on-ramp on the edge of a rather large freeway) before giving us Winter Dreaming., a piece written and rewritten since the autumn which deals in childhood nostalgia (among other things). Liz’s poetry is not so much cinematic as televisual - abandoning wide screen imagery for more immediate, more tightly cropped pictures and a conspiracy of shared imagination
The only catch is that she - like several of us - winds up struggling against the roar of West Ham and Tottenham on the big screen next door.
Claudine marks her reprise with her version of Streets of London, which she first heard the man himself play live at the Gosport Festival. Most people know this one - well, the chorus, anyway - and Claudine carries the main voice confidently and evenly. It’s a good song at this point as it is getting dark and it’s time to run for home...
...except that any hope of leaving quietly is lost with
Bill’s return, as he immediately unleashes The Great God Pan, which utilises a sonorous voice to tell a tale of a libidinous god apparently on the loose round the M25. Which road we come down to get here is a mystery to me - satnav or no - and Bill winds up with Come Browse With Me which manages to mix browsing, dowsing and courting in a slightly dodgy accent which he describes as coming from some where between Ontario and Tipperary. By the time we’ve finished with nettle wine and strange fertility symbols it’s 5.40 p.m. and time for a
Close
as Debbie and Claudine make the necessary speeches to get us from here to 18th March (the next outbreak of FabFever) and we’ve about come down to the end of another one.
And, in turn, with the bottom off the page approaching ever faster it’s time for me to sign off and disappear into cyberspace so until the next one... (!?!)
Gordon Shears
March 2007