Roll up, roll up, roll up! Come ye hither, all who swing, sing, and shake yon thing. A sexy, sassy spring evening of lively licks, rippin’ riffs and rollicking rhymes were the reward for those who chose to forego their evening stout by the fireplace and do something more interesting instead. And a tantalising triptych was on hand to massage the senses of regulars and occasionals alike.
You know how it goes. You wait ages for an alter-ego and then three come along at once. And so it was that the proverbial came to pass in the form of our old friend, Sleeping Gypsy aka Bob Honson aka Robbie Ward (formerly of Luva Anna and Anderson, McGinty, Webster, Ward and Fisher). Some musicians blast you with vocal range or bamboozle with tricksy guitar manoeuvres. And there’s nothing wrong with that but how lovely it is to see an artist who can draw a line from his heart to the audience seemingly without breaking sweat. Looks easy, but it’s not. Brilliant.
Next up we had Mark Richardson, the Poet Chandon of Tayside. In one of his first performances (not that you’d know it), Mark explored the whole range of life, the universe and Dundee. If you want to see humanity, red in tooth and claw, spat out with real talent and bare emotion, go and see Mark. And the Heisenberg notebook was a nice touch.
And so to round off the evening, our headliners were wizardly wonderful The Railsplitters. The flavoursome fivesome brought their heavenly hewn pieces of wood and string across oceans, down valleys and up A roads and B, to deliver a bluegrass class of simmering sass that made mountain men and maidens of all us. Hailing from Boulder, Colorado, The Railsplitters take the clever, pretty songs of banjo maestro (and beard in chief) Dusty Rider and spin a neat, sweet web of sound around them. Down in the bassment comes Leslie Ziegler on upright bass, up top, working away like a hummingbird is Christine King on fiddle. Peter Sharpe on mandolin fills things out beautifully and Lauren Stovall fronts (if you can say that of such an ensemble cast), plays her guitar like a country queen and sings with the voice of an angel. The all round playing and singing is just bloody lovely. Great!
Check out The Railsplitters here: www.therailsplitters.com
Sleeping Gypsy is here: www.jollification.uk
