I’ll be performing at the PLAYTIME sessions with Tom Bancroft (drs), Martin Kershaw (ss & as) and Sue Mackenzie (bari & ss),on Thursday 6th October.
Playtime is a fabulous gig in a fine venue, and I’m looking forward to it. Sue MacKenzie is a wonderful player and we haven’t really worked together outside of GIO.
I’ve always been a great fan of Tom Bancroft’s projects, and the PLAYTIME online sessions from Pathhead Village Hall were one of the few regular gigs that kept going during the lockdown. Clíona Cassidy and I did our RAIN SHADOW songs there, and you can see the gig here:
https://www.facebook.com/playtimemusic1/live
It was a strange experience! Although it magically looks like a conventional gig, we were all carefully isolated and we could only move in tightly prescribed areas. Tom bought us some fish & chips, and he had to place our orders carefully in the middle of the hall. The we all had to file forward one at a time to pick them up.
I was living in Falkirk at the time, and drove past Clíona’s place to pick her up and drive round the Edinburgh Bypass to Pathhead. The weather was wet & windy. Following the Govt coronavirus guidance, Clíona was in the back seat wrapped up in scarf, woolly hat and gloves while I drove through the wind and rain with the car windows wide open.
The music went pretty well: some of the songs are quite tricky to play, and Graeme, Tom, Mario and Martin played them beautifully, despite my scrappy parts and diffident leadership style. I played the guitar part to Clíona’s song THE LIGHTHOUSE on electric guitar, instead of the classical, and made a hash of it. The free stuff was nice though. A bit subdued, but none the worse for that…
George Burt 