THE PERFECT STORM

Since re-energising our recorded  portfolio, Colin is now creating a radio comedy series called Open Mic which brings together a number of characters created from our songs or who are drawn on other performers and audience members we met during those years..
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I spy JOSEPHINE BAKER, a musician on a  special mission

Drawing on a plethora of new historical material and rigorous research, including previously undisclosed letters and journals, Lewis upends the conventional story of Josephine Baker, explaining why she fully deserves her unique place in the French Panthéon. 
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WOODY´S EDUCATION CENTRE LEGACY& Phil Ochs´ Fellowship

The Woody Guthrie prize has been awarded over the past few years to luminaries like Springsteen, Joan Baez, (left) . John Mellencamp, Kris Kristofferson, Mavis Staples and Pete Seeger. “We hope that the Woody Guthrie Prize will shed an inspirational light on those who have decided to use their talents for the common good rather than for personal gain,” says Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora. “With his dry wit, Woody always preferred to call himself a ‘commonist.’ His quote from John Steinbeck’s character, Tom Joad, says it pretty simply: ‘Wherever children are hungry and cry, wherever people ain’t free, wherever men are fightin’ for their rights, that’s where I’m gonna be.’

unknown OUTSIDE OF A SMALL CIRCLE OF FRIENDS

However, there has been validation of a kind for Phil Ochs. Join us tomorrow when we visit the Woody Guthrie Centre to learn more

Rochdale And Lanzarote, similar in shape, size, and style !

The kind of joined up, grown up interactions between enterprises such as English Folk Expo (represented by Tom Besford) and  dedicated media services such as all across the arts (as represented by Steve Cook) my own sites here at Sidetracks And Detours and Lanzarote Information, Steve Bewick at Hot Biscuits and Larry Yaskiel, who so willingly shares opportunities with his readers at Lancelot, can surely deliver the strong support network that will enable artists to focus on their creativity,….to the benefit of all of us and society in general. In fact, Mr. Cooke treads heavy footprints all across the arts for the rest of us to follow. He is a prime example of how effective networking saves time, cost and energy, and a look at his current all across the arts round up in the glossy Style magazine(a newish venture, this dor Steve) will help he and and Ruth (who has taken over the editorship of the magazine from her father Colin Meredith) deliver news ever more widely. 

Sidetracks & Detours through THE PERFECT STORM

a walk on the wildside through a perfect storm from Glasgow to Manchester to South Africa to Texas and back to Lanzarote

COWBOY JACK AND HANK AND ME

As the album faded I could almost see the shades dropping from people´s eyes, And the raggle taggle wanderers lost boys looking for a home in the night instead found a home forever in the past, present and future of music that creates and celebrates perpetuity. .

BOSSA NOVA IN THE CAVES

The album Getz/Gilberto spent 96 weeks in the US charts and 'The Girl from Ipanema' would become the world's second most played song behind the Beatles' 'Yesterday'.

… she walks these hills in a LONG BLACK VEIL

In much the same way as Waterloo Sunset, written by Ray Davis of The Kinks, Long Black Veil is a ninety minute cinema epic written as a three minute song: a dime store-novel in three verses and a chorus.

JOURNALISTS  GO  ON  RECORD

Van Morrison is a favourite companion of mine whenever I am driving around on Lanzarote. When the sun is burning in the sky and ´the back of my neck is getting dirty and gritty´ with all the sand, there is no better sound than that of Van Morrison wrestling with the profundity of God and Time and The Cosmos and spittin´and cussin´  at his own inarticulate speech of the heart. He always sounds to me to be taking part in somew frustrating search for something (who knows what?) that he feels he might never find