Don’t miss the rest of our LS Lowry series, starting tomorrow we take a look inside the theatre named after him and continue on Wednesday, when we will be Going To The Match and talking about Damien Hirst on the way. On Thursday we shall watch the film Mrs. Lowry And Son before closing our Festival on Friday by celebrating the arts´s life.
The Arts are so powerful. They make you feel like anything and everything is possible. I don’t like barriers.
´Spencer’s songs came out of a 1970s scene that blurred folk, punk and pub rock, but were grounded in the work of the likes of Woody Guthrie and John Lee Hooker. Between 1974 and 1978, he gigged and recorded with his group, the Louts, then, in 1980, teamed up a collective of musicians who outgrew the Albion Band to become the Home Service. This group represented a major development in folk-rock, and members of it featured in variants of the John Spencer Alternative.
Punk had opened the doors for all-girl bands like us. The energy levels on those tours was insane. The Specials would get the audience on stage. Venues just weren’t built for that many people jumping. At one gig on a pier I looked down and I could see the sea beneath the floor. Afterwards there’d be schoolgirl pranks like apple pie beds and water pistols. I was 20. Miranda [Joyce, saxophone] was 16.
So, when I turned my head for just a few moments and twenty six years Jewel had crafted for herself a laudable career and achieved a great deal of admirable charity work
Where would I be withouty those songs that Loretta wrote
September’s Official Folk Albums Chart has been announced, featuring a new top seller and eight other new entries that demonstrate the breadth of music to be found within the wider folk genre.
On one particular Burns Night event, attended by all the Lord Mayors and Lady Mayoresses and several other dignitaries of Greater Manchester, I and a dozen practitioners from the writing group I facilitated in the Borough overcame that acoustic difficulty by stomping around that same Hall proclaiming I Will Walk Five Hundred Miles until, finally, the gold-chained audience joined in our chanting conga line.By then they had drank enough to be convinced we were reciting a lesser known piece by Burns himself.
The inauguration here, though, in the glorious Ermita was wonderful. As we walked through the doors of what has for so long served as a church we were stunned by the huge amount of art work on display (left), which spoke of an artist of diversity and sensitivity. There were huge paintings that would adorn the walls of any of the luxurious villas here on the island, but there were also scores of paintings on objets trouve: mostly driftwood to remind us of our wonderful coastline.
Whilst it is not wholly unreasonable to conjecture that bees and even educated fleas do it, bursting into song is something that Rochdale Jazz Club audiences have historically held should be strictly the for the birds or – more politically correctly perhaps – for the fairer sex. As the incomparable Monsieur Chevalier recommended, we unfailingly ‘Thank Avians For Little Girls’?
