As I celebrate all sorts of significant milestones there are a few aspects of my career that are coming to an end although actually retiring might be viewed as an exaggeration by many. Below are some of the things that are happening and some that are winding down.
– full dates and details in the Events section.
The Thursday night classes at Cecil Sharp House are still going on for now. Just 8 classes left for me so catch them while you can –
I will be appearing at Friday Folk on 17th May and Barnet Barn Dance Group on 29th April
Quicksilver will be doing a wedding ceilidh at the beginning of April and I will be doing one with records for a lovely couple 22 years and 4 gigs on from their wedding in Jersey. It’s become a tradition. It’s a far cry from the 40 odd gigs a year, maybe 9 or 10 at most but they are still good, especially when we can get members of the band back together.
Solo Gigs Following the wonderful Folk on the Common event in September I now have two really interesting gigs. Dealing with Death (looking at different times and cultures) in Cambridge on May 11th and two days of solo Music Hall at Milton Keynes Museum on 8th and 9th June. There are two other concerts in prospect but no dates yet.
Sadly it is goodbye to Tradamis. Having looked around we decided that with 20 years as a charity and a bit longer as an active organisation it had come to the end of the road and is being dismantled. Allcock and Brown is almost certainly going the same way and while the mAy team is still alive it seems unlikely that there will be any major events and we have probably performed our last at the Chiltern Open Air Museum. The enquiries that are coming in are being passed to the younger and more energetic members of the team while I retreat to consultative and administrative role. I am also rather sad that the Folk Educators Open Space Zoom sessions have come to an end having served their wonderful and useful purpose since they started during lockdown.
So that still leaves Care Homes, Brownies, Barn Dances, Concerts, hopefully some with Zoë Jasko, and Talks, with some new topics, to keep me busy not to mention the Morris, Mummers and Books but everything now needs to be something I want to do to give myself much more time to do things that are not work.
Hardly mentioned so far. I really think that there will not be many actual Maypole gigs for me. I have one school that I will be working with but otherwise I am looking, as far as possible to hand these on to others. Obviously, there is still The Maypole Manual and it’s accompanying website. The website will be upgraded in the next month or so and I will continue to work on promoting these and with a former colleague Anne Garrison am looking at creating a Directory of Maypole People.
So what has happened in the 6 months since the last newsletter. I have already mentioned the Folk on the Common concert in Redbourn and I notice that my fellow performers have been performing in Nashville, Elizabeth and Jameson, and are booked for the Friday at Cropredy, Ragnari. I then had gigs at Kings Lynn, Guildford, Shanties at Hughenden Garden Village, a wedding ceilidh in East London before taking a few weeks off to sort out the refurbishment of my flat (still struggling to find all my paperwork – its probably in the garage!).
Then there were conferences with the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, Grappling with Tradition, in London and a Folk Educators event at UEA in Norwich. I had a couple of St Andrews events in Care Homes and then it was Christmas themes plus a few barn dances up until the Mummers on Boxing Day. My previous New Year’s Eve solo event in the village of Roxton got upgraded very successfully to a Quicksilver gig and then there were three Burns events, way down on the usual 8 or 9, a single Valentines theme and now I can get my breath back and plan for the rest of the year.
