Hi and welcome to this week’s Dreamers Newsletter.
Another good night at the Club on Sunday with some very welcome visitors – Mary and Ken who are, of course, regular visitors to Cornwall (as well as our Zoom sessions), Steve from Lincolnshire who has been with us in each of the last few years and Alistair’s friend, George and his wife, again known to many of us from the zoom sessions. It’s always particularly nice when visitors come back time after time, part of what Dreamers has always been about.
On to another Zoom session this coming Saturday, 24th September, starting at 7.30 as always. We’ve already had requests for the link from two new names, one in the UK and one in California. As usual the link will go out tomorrow and we’ll hope to see plenty of familiar faces from Cornwall, around the UK and from further afield.
We got to know Bruce and Jill Watson from Australia well during the Dreamers Zoom sessions when he entertained us with some of the 30 songs he wrote in the first 30 days of lockdown there. With the time difference during British Summer Time we haven’t seen them for a few months but he tells us that, after their adventurous overland trip to the Gulf of Carpentaria, he is are now back at work on the new album “Year of Wonders”. It’s now all recorded and edited and moving on to mixing and the artwork with launch events booked in Melbourne before year end before a wider tour – he expects to be in the UK next October – hopefully we can welcome him to Cornwall.
This Saturday 24th September at 8.00, the on-line site Live to Your Living Room welcomes Greg Russell in a hybrid gig (live and on line), hosted in Sheffield with Live At Sam’s. Greg won two BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards (and was nominated for a third). He was the creative force behind the political song project Shake the Chains and was a member of the twice touring Transports musical. Tickets from Greg Russell | Online Gig | Live to Your Living Room
And Folk on Foot has announced a set of “Front Room Gigs”, exclusively for their “heroes” (for which you have to pay £10 per month for which you get various benefits including exclusive access to Folk on Foot on Film – an amazing – and growing – archive of more than 150 unique performances of songs filmed on location during their walks, These gigs are an hour long, from 3.00 to 4.00 on Sunday afternoons with the first two featuring Karine Polwart on 25th September and Martin Simpson on 20th November. More info at https://www.folkonfoot.com
Folklife is now one of the last UK-wide print magazines specialising in folk. We do get some paper copies of the magazine but you can also see all the articles and news at www.folklife.uk. It’s a great piece of work and well worth having a look – not least if you are travelling around and want to know if there are any folk clubs to visit where you’ll be – I’m sure you would be as welcome as visitors to Dreamers are.
And finally, the very sad news that Paul Sartin unexpectedly died last week at the age of only 51. I’m sure that many of us have great memories of Paul as a member of Belshazzars Feast, Faustus and Bellowhead. Paul was the winner of numerous awards and involved with numerous projects and albums as singer, instrumentalist, composer and arranger – a very sad loss.
That’s all for this week, hope to see you on zoom on Saturday evening and/or at Dreamers on Sunday.
All the best
Nigel