Last Wednesday, January 25th was the day of the Andy Roberts featured evening at Haverfolk, formerly known as Havering Folk Club. Why did they change the name? I don’t really get it, you’d have to ask Simon or Peter. Anyway, after a recent period of not playing guitar so much really, I managed to get in just about the right amount of rehearsal time in the days before and decided to go ahead with the plan of doing three new songs and basing the rest of the entire setlist on my own material, much as I had done so for the guest night at Romford Folk Club, nearly a year earlier.
The full set list for the night as actually played is viewable with links to each of the songs on my own wiki, here at : January 2012 setlist and any upcoming gigs are on the Main page, such as the one at Loughton on Thursday April 19th, 2012.
Setting off for the venue was a bit traumatic, as an electrical fault had caused a series of cancellations on the main from Liverpool Street Station to Romford, so we went to see what the buses were looking like, just missed one, and saw that the traffic on the main road was choc a block. So we went back to the station and waited for the next train due, which should have been a half hour wait under the abnormal circumstances but then that one was cancelled too. There was nothing for it but to lug the two guitar cases and ourselves onto a busy number 86 bus and just sit it out as we chugged our way up along the occupied bus lanes and through the congested area around Ilford. We would arrive late for the start of the evening perhaps, but not late for my own appearance due around 9 O’clock which in the event we turned up well in time for. So that’s the transport news, then. A bit of a preoccupation with people who live in the London area I’m afraid.
The gig itself went well, I thought, I was reasonably happy with the performances and the guitars stayed mostly in tune. The turn out was good, and people said they enjoyed the music, so that’s a big result, and one of the best things is that Linda’s front row video recording managed to capture the full setlist with no problems, so we have a decent audio and visual of all 21 original tunes. There’s a possibility of bringing that out as a DVD which will become the latest release from me to replace the few copies of the “Sampler” EP I’ve been carrying around for almost three years now!
I think I ‘ll be turning the soundtrack into three episodes for the podcast series, and uploading a few songs to youTube as well, but the first one I’ve got processed is the finale song where I managed to get two violinists up on stage with me, namely John Foxen and Richie Barratt with Pep on Banjo and I think you can just hear Bernie on concertina and Mickie Brown on harmonica as well. Here’s Cajun Music Cajun Food live at Haverfolk
