Waterloo Sunset

It was good to see Richard who hasn't been to the club for some time, no doubt looking after Lesley, who has been recovering from injury. Our beloved leader, Maggie, also made an appearance. More surprisingly, at least to Mike, Gary and Helen were both there without a medical excuse, or as he put it, Helen was there "voluntarily" - something which is definitely to be encouraged.

Colin was MC and he asked Derek to start us off.

Derek sang this gloriously geographically inaccurate version of Higher Germany (Roud 904) rather than the more usual version.

Battle of Waterloo by William Sadler

I feel I should make an aside comment at this point. I was talking to someone a few weeks ago who reads and apparently enjoys this blog but for various reasons doesn't join us at The New Inn. He praised us for being so serious about our folk music. While it is true that some of our members are quite serious the overriding aspect of the Dragon Folk Club is fun. He had based his assessment on the fact that my blog posts regularly quote Roud, Child and Laws references for traditional songs when I can find them. I would like to say that this reflects more my penchant for categorising and indexing all manner of things. Don't worry, we aren't really like that; come and see for yourself.

I hope you'll forgive me for keeping this report quite short this week since I have several other commitments at the moment. As usual you can follow the "a selection" link below to hear many of the songs sung at the session.

A theme emerged for the evening, driven by the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. The Kinks song in the title of this post was suggested, as was the obvious Abba song, but no one picked up that particular gauntlet.

I won't attempt to mention all of the songs that fitted the bill but here is a selection. Colin's first was Little Boney, sung to the tune of The Roast Beef Of Old England. It's been a difficult one to track down but you can find the lyric here.

Simon, having used up Boney Was A Warrior only two weeks ago, sang The Rout Of The Blues (Roud 21098). Likewise, Derek recently used up Bonny Bunch Of Roses, so he plumped for Napoleon's Dream (Roud 1538 - Sam Larner's version).

I must mention that I picked up an action to confirm who wrote one song Colin sang; not a folk song. It was Frank Loesser's Sit Down You're Rocking The Boat, from the musical Guys and Dolls. That shows the wide range of our music at the Dragon Folk Club and you'll see even more surprises if you look through past reports on this blog.

Finally, the evening was brought to a close with a bit of fun by Richard, singing Bernard Wrigley's What Can You Do When Your Clogs Let Water In.

Here's a selection of these and other songs sung during this session.

(Number of people present - 9, of which 8 performed)