Author Archives: bridget

Showcase with Terence Blacker on Friday 11 May

Posted on by

Copyright Rob Howarth Photography
Terence Blacker

The showcase guest at the song session on Friday 11 May will be local performer Terence Blacker. Once described by the Boston Globe as ‘an angry, smart, and funny man’, Terence Blacker is a songwriter, singer and author who has sung and read at festivals, clubs and theatres in the UK, Europe and America. His songs have been compared to the work of Jake Thackray, Tom Lehrer, Noel Coward and Jacques Brel, but his style is very much contemporary and his own.

Terence will perform two sets within the song session. Free entry with raffle. Bring your own drinks. Teas and coffee available in the kitchen.

Chris Sherburn and Denny Bartley with Emily Sanders on Friday 27 April

Posted on by

Chris Sherburn and Denny Bartley have been bringing their unique sound to audiences across Europe and America since the early 1990s, when a chance meeting at a music session created one of folk music’s most enduring partnerships. The duo were founder members of the band Last Night’s Fun, which achieved international fame.

Chris (concertina) grew up surrounded by folk music of all kinds – his home was a regular haunt for passing folk singers and musicians. Denny (guitar and vocals), born in Co. Limerick, is drawn to the inheritance of age-old slides, slow airs, slip jigs and wild reels. The duo are joined by wonderful fiddle-player and singer Emily Sanders.

Let us know if you are planning to come along via the email on our contact page. Tickets £11 (£8 members) can be reserved and paid for on the door. Bring your own drinks. Teas and coffee are available in the kitchen (50p). Some parking is available immediately outside the Christ Church Centre – please double park to help us get more cars in!

Tony Hall on Friday 16 March

Posted on by

We look forward very much to welcoming local celebrity, melodeon player and modest wit Tony Hall back to the Folk Club on Friday 16 March. Summed up by Islington Folk Club as: ‘East Anglian melodeon player with a distinctive, quintessentially English style, who played on the iconic ’80s Nic Jones release Penguin Eggs. Hall’s sets are laid-back affairs, interspersed with his dry, sometimes gently surreal humour.’

Please let us know if you would like us to save tickets £9 (£6 members), via the email on the contact page. Bring your own drinks. Teas and coffee available in the kitchen.

The Norwich Folk Club AGM, which was postponed from 23 February due to illness, will now be held on Friday 23 March at 8 pm, to be followed by a song session, open to all, from around 9 pm.

Jackie Oates duo on Friday 16 February

Posted on by

Since appearing as a finalist in the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Awards 2003, singer and fiddle-player Jackie Oates has performed extensively at festivals and venues across the country and beyond, in a solo capacity and with her band. A founder member of Northumbrian group and Mercury nominated Rachel Unthank and the Winterset, Jackie is now a permanent member of the folk super-group The Imagined Village, as well as touring in her own right.

Jackie has several albums, including ‘The Spy Glass and the Herringbone‘, which contains lesser known but life-affirming songs from the English tradition and was released in 2015. In researching her 2013 album, ‘Lullabies’, Jackie invited submissions over the internet and the collected songs are housed at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at Cecil Sharp House in London, home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Poor Robin

Tickets £11 (£8 members). Reserve by emailing via the contact page. Bring your own drinks. Teas and coffee available in the kitchen. Please double park to allow as many cars in the carpark as possible.

The Shackleton Trio on Friday 19 January

Posted on by

The guests on Friday 19 January will be the Shackleton Trio, a lively local band featuring fiddle-player and songwriter Georgia Shackleton, supported by guitarist Aaren Bennett and mandolin player Nic Zuppardi. Georgia writes and performs ‘wordy songs about other people’, instrumentally influenced by British, American and Scandinavian folk traditions, with a regional twist.

The Trio have toured the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, and have performed at Cambridge Folk Festival and Folk East, Towersey and Broadstairs Folk Week, as well as folk clubs across the UK.

Tickets £11 (£8 club members) can be reserved via our contact page. Bring your own drinks. Teas and coffee available in the kitchen.

The club’s Christmas Party will be on Friday 22 December. All welcome. Bring your own drinks and perhaps some food to share.  Seasonal songs, tunes and a grand raffle.

Norwich Folk Club will also meet on Friday 29 December this year.

Martyn Wyndham Read and Iris Bishop on 1 December

Posted on by

Martyn Wyndham-Read has been involved with folk music for over 40 years. In his late teens he left his mother’s farm in Sussex and headed off, with his guitar, to Australia where he worked on a sheep station in South Australia. It was while he was there that he heard, first hand, the old songs sung by some of the station hands at Emu Springs and he became captivated by these songs and the need to know more of them and where they came from grew.

Martyn headed off to Melbourne and became part of the folk song revival there and throughout Australia during the early1960s. Based back in the UK, he has toured worldwide, performing a variety of traditional and contemporary songs. Martyn is accompanied by box player Iris Bishop.

Tickets £11 (£8 club members) can be reserved via the email link on our contacts page. Bring your own drinks. Coffee and teas available in the kitchen.

Said the Maiden on Friday 10 November

Posted on by

Photo by Elly Lucas www.ellylucas.co.uk

Award winning trio Said The Maiden are Jess Distill, Hannah Elizabeth and Kathy Pilkinton, three friends who discovered a mutual love of folk music when they reunited several years after spending their school years together in Hertfordshire. After tentatively performing a few songs at their local Redbourn Folk Club, the group soon gained a great deal of interest on the local and national folk circuit, securing major support and headline slots at folk clubs and festivals around the country.

Said the Maiden have also opened for many great artists including The Full English, The Fisherman’s Friends, Jim Moray, Megson, Martin Carthy, Clannad, Cara Dillon, False Lights and Fairport Convention. They were also honoured to join legendary fiddler the late Dave Swarbrick on a successful UK solo tour in the spring of 2014, and released their debut album ‘A Curious Tale’ in June of the same year. In 2016, the group went on to release their EP ‘Of Maids And Mariners’, which was met with critical acclaim across the folk community and in 2017 the trio won the Folking Awards ‘Rising Star’ prize.

“Rising doyennes of the folk scene … I can hear why Said The Maiden have already made themselves a healthy reputation, and I can also sense a strong measure of untapped potential.” (David Kidman, FATEA Magazine)

Tickets £11 (£8 club members) can be reserved by emailing us via the form on the contact page. Bring your own drinks. Teas and coffee available in the kitchen.

On Friday 27 October the song session theme will be Halloween. Tenuous connections to the theme are equally welcome.

The James Brothers on Friday 13 October

Posted on by

Photo: Elly Lucas

The James Brothers come from the lands down under – Australia and New Zealand to be precise; lands in which the traditional songs and tunes of the British Isles have evolved their own unique characteristics. And it’s these songs and tunes, and several of their own making, that The James Brothers have united to play.

Sydney-born James Fagan is best known as one half of Nancy Kerr & James Fagan (musically and maritally), but also spotted playing guitar and bouzouki in The Cara Dillon Band, the live circus that is Bellowhead and with his parents and sister as The Fagans, where his folk career began.

Jamie McClennan is a Kiwi who found himself in a duo with Scotland’s BBC-award-winning Emily Smith (whom he also married) having chosen not to follow his first bandmates to Ireland, where they formed the much celebrated Gráda.Jamie has been sighted on fiddle, whistle and guitar next to the likes of Sharon Shannon, Beth Nielson Chapman, Jerry Douglas and his mum.

Tickets £11 (£8 club members) can be reserved by emailing via our contact page. Bring your own drinks – teas and coffee available in the kitchen.

Flossie Malavialle on Friday 22 September

Posted on by

Our guest on Friday 22 September, Flossie Malavialle, is a French-born singer and guitarist who has been based in the North East of England since 2002. Flossie sings and plays a wide variety of songs in French, English and Spanish interspersed with a touch of humorous Geordie-French banter which gives her performances a certain ‘je ne sais quoi‘.

Flossie has played throughout the UK and far beyond and has so far recorded 12 albums. Her repertoire extends from well established folk songs to jazz standards, from blues numbers to Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel’s classics.

Tickets £11 (£8 club members), can be reserved by emailing via our contact page. Bring your own drinks. Teas and coffee available in the kitchen.

The theme at the song session on Friday 15 September will be Harvest. All welcome to come along, whether to listen, sing or play. Free entry.