We are pleased to announce our very first bangin’ show of all-broadside-bangers, Friday 24th February at the Poly, Falmouth. Details and tickets here
Then we will be taking the show around Cornwall:
Sat 25th Feb – Praa Sands Community Centre
Friday 3rd March – Warleggan Jubilee Hall
Friday 10th March – Lambeage Hall, Coverack
We have been working for some time now on this new anthology of some of the most melodramatic, gruesome and supernatural broadside ballads from the 17th to 19th centuries, and will be presenting these as a full on evening’s entertainment of ballads interspersed with appropriate folk tunes from all around.
These popular ballads, selected from the Bodleian and EFDSS archives, cover everything from funeral arrangements to cat food and rural insurrection and date from the 17th-19th centuries. We have made it our business to rummage through the bin for the most misanthropic and inappropriate material, throwing a light on some of the hectoring and judgemental behaviour which is still with us today, as well as emerging with some genuinely haunting and emotive songs which seem to have been mislaid over the years.
Most of these ballads have no documented tunes attached, and so the words have been rearranged and re-fitted with newly composed music on piano, accordions, violin, drums, bouzouki, bass, banjo and guitar in an appropriately bawdy style for these rough street literature gems.
We also have some other gigs coming up soon (which will be a mixture of these ballads and some of our classics)
Sat 4th Feb – Green Note, Camden – details and tickets here
Sun 5th Feb – The Bell, Bath – Sunday lunchtime gig
Julian Gaskell 