At the Fiddle Jamboree!

With it just around the corner, London is gearing up for the big week of Christmas and New Years. For me, Christmas for the past few years have been spent round Kyle's, sitting in front of the fire, most likely watching Ice Age or some other animated movie with a mug of tea and Molly curled up in my lap. Seizing the opportunity to catch some events happening in the capital, K spent ages yesterday trying to get tickets to see The Nutcracker (!!!) only there were no tickets left - bought up by small box offices perhaps..? Que plan B. Go for the instant solution= Go somewhere that night. Not wanting to go out on a big night out having slogged through the weekend we figured we might go to The Green Note in Camden and have a relaxing Sunday evening listening to some live music. UNTIL! we found out that the English Folk Dance and Song Society just around the corner from The Green Note was having a fiddle night! How cool.

Ready for some foot stomping choones off they went and what a wonderful night there was to be had.

Probably the best band of the night


Firing up those strings

These guys played some lovely English folk music- starting off from a tune from the Lake District. I'm no fiddle expert/afficionado nor do I pretend to be one but these guys were brilliant and you could see they had been playing together for a long time. We moved on to some good ole Irish and Scottish folk songs which brought the musicians into a fiddle playing frenzy!


Everyone was welcome to join in
Think bags of crisps, bottles of bring your own, cheese, dip, crusty bread... mmmm...

You've got to love those Mandolins
On Monday nights Pete Cooper, the guy on the end with the white hair, holds Mandolin classes and these were a few of his students. Pete also organized the night together where most of the crowd were students of his. Not only did most of the people know each other, they all knew the same tunes so during most of the songs the crowd joined in, improvised and often carried on playing a totally different tune so by the end of each set, you would already have had a medly of 4 or 5 songs incorporated into each other. After this picture was took, they started on some more Eastern European tunes including Russian folk music which ended in a cocophone of all the instruments playing in the room (of which there were many different kinds - one of which I have never seen before) frantically playing to a foot stomping climax!

Sleepy eyed and still reeling from the journey taken from England, to Ireland, to Scotland, to Russia while dancing to the polska and waltzing to the tune of the mandolin-men they bid goodnight their companions for the evening and came back home, back to the norm and fell into a fiddle-induced slumber.

xxw