The Half Moon All Stars in a mellower mood than usual.
Three traditional English tunes, performed by The Half Moon All Stars at a ‘Summer Folk’ gig held at our local on 22 May 2016. The three tunes are Newcastle, and then Jamaica, and then Portsmouth. (You see the logic?)
Thanks to Hannah Bond, as ever, for the filming.
Big sound. Impossibly unimaginably heartstoppingly colossally loud…
Thanks to Josh R-H for this recommendation.
It is simply impossible for me to describe Moulettes without swearing. Sorry.
They have a fucking electric bassoon. They might be the best band that ever lived.
Or ‘How I learnt to stop worrying and love the B-Movie’.
I’ve been meaning to set up a section on this website for all the things in culture that I think are great. Turns out, my friend Oliver has already set up a website with a better title than I had in mind. So I thought I’d put this there:
http://www.eulogizethis.com/star-wars-fantastic-menace/
A very scratchy cover of this lovely Nanci Griffith song. You can buy her original album here: http://www.amazon.com/Once-Very-Blue-Nanci-Griffith/dp/B00005UMTG
Performed at the Catweazle Club on Cowley Road in Oxford, on 31 March 2016.
As Nanci Griffith would introduce it: when you get two full moons in one month, the second is called the blue moon.
(Thanks to whoever was sitting next to me for filming – I’m really sorry, I forgot your name…)
Really can’t recommend this song enough – just been stuck in my head for weeks.
I also love this video. Because although Nancy is clearly supposed to look winsome and romantic, you can see that she is visibly distracted by the psychological trauma of having to do a shot where she swims in a lake in the British Isles: where summer means nothing and hypothermia is a very real possibility.
When we heard that the final Bellowhead gig ever* was going to be in Oxford, in the Town Hall, on the first of May… it all sounded a bit too good to be true.
If that doesn’t mean anything to you: Bellowhead have been so much more than the most popular folk band in England. Never mind that they won award after award, and got signed to a major label, and were generally considered the best live act in the country by folk and non-folk pundits alike… they just set the agenda. Every album they released simultaneously opened doors for what’s possible with traditional music, and closed other doors because “we can’t do that or it’ll sound like we’re trying to be Bellowhead”. For me personally, they were the band that sparked my interest in traditional English music, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen them live. And some of those times were better than others, but even the worse times were a better live experience than most bands on a good night.
But it held more significance for me. The first time I ever saw them live was 10 years before, almost to the day, in the same venue. And on that dancefloor I met a group of friends who got me into folk festivals and eventually playing in the band for Armaleggan. So it was kind of a big deal.
In fact, let me show you a little video from my old undeleteable YouTube account, that I made about the joys of Bellowhead, back in 2008.
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