The Curate's Egg

In front of the speakers without earplugs
(Photo: Simon Meeds)

[Edit: Just in case it isn't clear, the attached photograph was not taken at The Bridge last week. It is simply intended to suggest the experience we unfortunately had during the session. Read on to see what I mean. The photograph was taken about five years ago at a different event and the girls are not known to us - Simon was an official photographer at that event. We only have acoustic performances at the Dragon Folk Club]

Last week's Dragon Folk Club session wasn't the best, hence the title. The Curate's Egg is known to be good in parts and it was definitely the singers present who were the good part of our evening. Everything else was rather unfortunate, especially since we had our previous MC, Mike, present for the first time since mid-May 2022 (according to the blog records), as well as first time visitor Rob.

There were two issues which conspired to make this possibly our worst ever experience at The Bridge. There was a loud, live band in the main bar, and the gents toilets were out of action. The latter meant that people were constantly filing through our room to the back-up toilets (no pun intended) and while they were all polite, it meant the door was constantly opening and allowing in the full blast of the band's music. We posted a man on the door to keep it closed as much as possible, and we all sang at the top of our voices, but in the end it was just unworkable and we had to give up early.

This Friday should be much better - it certainly couldn't be worse.

Colin, the MC as usual, started off proceedings with The wild goose shanty (roud 328). Mike declared that there are many versions of that song, so he sang The wild goose shanty (roud 328); it's just like old times! If only our friend Derek had been there, we'd probably have got a third.

Rob does his own songs and poems, so naturally they were all new to the Dragon database, and in any case being his first visit they would all be mentioned here. His first was The Napoli (Rob Barratt), about the looting from the ship of that name which was beached at Branscombe in 2007.

Mike marked the recent fiftieth anniversary of the death of Adge Cutler and challenged all present to sign along to the chorus of Adge's Thee's got'n where thee cassn't back'n, hassn't.

Continuing the comedy Rob recited his poem The torpedo turd (Rob Barratt) about an impressive souvenir of the previous user of a toilet. This is one of only two performances of the evening not represented in the YouTube playlist linked from "a selection" below.

Talking of toilets, it was while Simon was singing Mary McCloud's House of the rising damp that we were joined by Sam on his way back from gaining some relief. While he didn't sing to us he did linger for a whole round of the four singers in the room and was very appreciative, listening also to Colin singing Hotel California (Don Felder, Don Henley, Glenn Frey), Mike with The Mary Ellen Carter (Stan Rogers), and Rob with Bloody who? (Rob Barratt).

The second and last performance not represented in the YouTube playlist was Colin's singing of Chris Sugden's Rolling drunk, a parody of Rolling home (John Tams).

Mike gave us Quare bungle rye (roud 2404).

Rob was inspired to write his poem Seventeen in Aberdeen (Rob Barratt) by a television weather forecast. After this things started to disintegrate and while we managed a few more songs we knew we were onto a loser.

I'm not quite sure why our friend Allie came walking though given that it was the gents toilet out of action as far as I was aware, but we introduced her to Rob and explained she was on our side and sometimes could be persuaded to sing. Indeed on her way back to the bar she gave us a couple of verses of Ian Campbell's Here come the navvies.

Colin soldiered on with Neil Young's After the goldrush, Simon gave top volume to Jake Thackray's Isabel makes love upon national monuments, and Mike completed the slightly abridged evening with Whip jamboree (roud 488); I assume it was actually Bristol Channel jamboree and therefore it is that which I linked.

Now listen to a selection of songs sung during this session.

(Number of people present - 6 of whom 5 performed - including Sam and Allie who each joined us for a short time and contributed to the evening)