This Sunday we visited CLAYGATE — at the tail-end of their superbly organised MUSIC FESTIVAL week — to see the pioneering British progressive rock group CURVED AIR play live in concert at the Claygate Village Hall. Their “Air Conditioning” album (1970) is still considered “essential listening” by the prog-rock crowd. It was exciting to see…
THE ACADEMY OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC (ACM), the world leader in music industry education, has announced that it is to take a 20-year lease charge for the Guildford arts venue known as The Electric Theatre. ACM’s 21-year history and 10,000 alumni legacy has made it a major player in the Guildford community, having generated and invested…
Last weekend we attended WEYFEST 2016 – it is the 10th Anniversary of this perfect family-friendly three-day festival held each year at the Rural Life Centre in Tilford, near Farnham in Surrey. [@Weyfest ] We arrived on Saturday. Opening the Main Stage at the Weyfest on Saturday was the superior SAIICHI SUGIYAMA band [@SaiichiSugiyamaBand] a Surrey…
Meal Ticket were a country rock band that played the London pub circuit in the late 1970s. The Canadian performer Rick Jones wrote many of their songs. Steve Simpson and Willy Finlayson played guitars (plus additional instruments ) in the original squad and are still going strong — now performing together in the band-project known…
The country-music songwriter and guitarist Ray Peters usually fronts-up the talented Smokey Turtle Band with the excellent Dean Barnes on guitar and Hannah Cope on bass. But last night the good folks at Staines’s first-class Riverside Club were treated to the honeyed mellifluence of LIZA MARSHALL on vocals. Liza’s voice is remarkable — husky with…
Watching Steve Whalley perform is like having all your anxieties and emotions torn from you and tossed into the wind — like confetti — then patiently and kindly stuck back together, with paste and water, by the good-hearted musician himself, on mandolin and guitar. He is the master of cathartic liberation — not hokey or…
KAT & CO introduce their audience to an expressive musical style… reminiscent of the Blues tradition — for example, they employ cigar box guitar, washboard, shakers etc — but they also focus on the gradual transition of the blues by developing something that is far more sophisticated and is, very obviously, ‘night-club ready.’ Their songs…
The Tulsa Sound is sparse yet complicated and exciting. The smoky genre is espoused by the likes of JJ Cale, Leon Russell and Eric Clapton. It is a combination of rockabilly, country-rock and blues. Packed with precision riffs, intricate finger-picking style and lively rhythms. This week we enjoyed this kind of genuine homecrafted bluesmanship at…
THE ALI MAC BAND features vocalist Ali MacKenzie, who was the original singer with the legendary R&B group The Birds. The Birds were a popular Brit band during the mid-1960s and were famous for having guitarist Ronnie Wood in their line-up. Another famous member of The Birds was Ronnie’s old comrade, the bassist Kim Gardner…
Sunset Boulevard is a six-part dance-band consisting of bass, drums, keyboards, guitar/vocals and twin-saxophones. The band members have played with artists as diverse as ‘Van Morrison’ to ‘Chas and Dave.’ We saw the London-based group play live this week at the admirable Staines Riverside Club. It was a wet Bonfire Night and the venue was…
Rocking Surrey 