January 24th/25th: Bradninch, Devon

Last tuesday I travelled down to Devon to play two gigs over two days consecutively: the first was at Bradninch Folk Club and the second was a living room gig in the same town. Coming with me was the lovely Nicola Redman (who’s accompanied me on a few of these gigs now) for our action-packed two-day mini-tour, and it really did turn out to be a bit on the ‘action-packed’ side…

On Tuesday morning, Nicola arrived at my flat and between us we managed to carry all the stuff down the road towards where my car was parked; there’s no parking outside where I live in London so I’ve been parking down a small side street nearby. As we approached the entrance to said side street, we were greeted by a bevy of police cars, ambulances and fire trucks blocking the entrance to the street. This did not bode well. Upon closer inspection it was revealed that a garage next to the area my car was parked in had chosen that morning to be on fire (luckily with no one hurt), which meant that although I could see my car – it was only about 200 feet from where we were stood – there was no way that we’d be able to get to it through the perimeter the Police had created around the fire. Enter Plan B: I reckoned that if we could approach the street from the other direction, we could get to the car and leave via a different route, so off we went. It began to rain heavily, which made things fun, but we managed to find the other end of the street at a point where I was pretty sure I could access the car. I left Nicola with the stuff and approached a Policeman who was busy stopping people from getting near the burning building, and after a small amount of light pleading and promising that I wasn’t going to attempt to drive past/through the fire (I also looked pretty bedraggled by this point, which may have helped), he allowed me to drive my car further down the road to pack it. Excellent: progress! So now we had the car with all the instruments in it we’d be able to happily be on our way to Devon. I drove the car away from the fire, around the estate and down a small road that led us… back to where the fire was. It seemed that there was no alternative way out of that street. I turned the car off and we resigned ourselves to waiting until the Police would let us through, however long that might take, but at least we were not getting rained on and things were greatly improved when Nicola produced a bag of food from her bag (food improves every situation, as does tea. My mum swears by the healing qualities of tea). We sat and ate oranges and oat cakes and played a game that involved guessing how close each passing pedestrian would get to the burning building before a policeman noticed them and leaped up to stop them. One bloke got amazingly close before the Policeman realised he was there. Bizarrely, I’m not sure that he’d actually notice the fire and various emergency services in front of him, but when you need to get to the shop to buy milk…

Anyway, eventually the nice Policeman I’d met earlier knocked on our window with a ‘good luck’ (I assumed for the gig, but possibly for life in general) and finally we were able to leave! It’s a good job that I tend to leave earlier than I need to in order to get places because we still managed to get to Bradninch on time!

When we arrived, the first people we met were Jon and Liz Williams, the hosts for the following night’s living room gig, who took us to the small B&B nearby where we could put our stuff before heading to our venue for the evening, the Bradninch Folk Club. Before the gig we were invited by the promoter, Gerard and his wife Joy, to join them for a brilliant home cooked dinner at their house, which after the long drive from London, plus our fire-based morning, was exactly what we needed! Feeling very well fed, we headed back over to the folk club to get cracking on the gig. There were a few musicians on before I played, one of which was Jerry, the owner of the little B&B that Nicola and I were staying at. He played an instrumental guitar set and there were a few other acts who played folk and one guy who played some great blues stuff with innuendo-based lyrics: something about biscuits…

Here’s ‘It must be love’ from my set that night:

During the interval a raffle was held with the usual raffle-esque array of prizes: chocolates, a hamper, a book… and a tin of Budget baked beans, which Nicola immediately had her eye on. Sadly, despite buying a whole row of raffle tickets, her dreams were not fulfilled and the beans went to someone else. However, as the triumphant winner of the beans walked passed us, they must have glanced at Nicola’s face, which was a picture of woe, because they gave her their hard-won beans! I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so happy.

The next day we had a fair amount of time before the living room gig that evening, so we decided to do a bit of exploring. Jon and Liz had told us about a huge vintage/antique warehouse nearby called Fagins, so we decided to start there. The place itself was enormous and seemed to be packed to the brim with an immense amount of old furniture and other vintage items. In fact, it had so much in it that it seemed to be spilling out of itself and the courtyard was full of old fridges, carts and two life-sized plastic cows. I had a brief chat with one of them, just to get a feel for the area…

It would have been very easy to get lost in that warehouse as the floors seemed to go on forever; every single surface was covered in old TVs, books, pub signs, tables, children’s toys, mannequins and bits of taxidermy. It felt a bit the inanimate object afterlife. The taxidermy section was especially impressive, if not a little unnerving (I like animals, but I prefer them alive), and it was amongst the stuffed weasels and heads of deer and foxes that we discovered a rather ancient and arthritic cat, who was very much alive and keen to say hello, but it did look alarmingly like one of the pieces of taxidermy and I had already been fooled once by a large stuffed dog sat on top of some giant bellows. It’s possible that someone else made the same mistake and put it there as part of the collection.

It wasn’t just us and the cat there, I did also meet this charming man hanging out by a snooker table:

He was a bit quiet, but I think we’ll stay friends.

The sign outside

The rest of the day was spent exploring the surrounding areas before heading back to Bradninch for the evening’s living room gig. We were greeted at the front door by a sign announcing the gig and when we entered the house, preparations were well underway! Two chairs signalled the placement of the stage and a purple gauze and some fairy lights provided an attractive backdrop. I should also mention here the extraordinary lengths that Jon had gone to to make sure that the living room would be big enough to house the entire audience: he had knocked a wall down. I’ve had people move furniture around and bring in extra chairs, but I’ve never had someone remove an whole section of their house for a gig before. Deeply impressive!

Once everyone had filtered in and found a place to sit, there were approximately 40 people in the living room and sat up the stairs. They were a lively and friendly audience and Jon had prepared them well for the ‘Go’ sing-a-long by asking them to learn it before they arrived, so here’s what I gave them:

Volume: 7/10

Enthusiasm: 9/10

Accuracy: 8/10

Giving them a very nice 24/30! Good work!

The first set went fairly smoothly, aside from a highly confusing moment when someone on the stairs activated a Thunderbird 1 toy and I thought the whole house was taking off. At the break in the middle, Nicola and I located a tupperware of mini pasties on the food table, which is something that we had been trying to find all day so we leaped upon the opportunity. However, we couldn’t eat them right then and there because we were about to start singing again and the two things don’t really mix, so we decided to put two of the mini-pasties in the bag containing my CDs to save until after the gig. This was a good, solid plan. Or at least, it would have been, were it not for the very accurate sense of smell that dogs have; Noodle the black labrador had been sat very patiently in front of me for most of the gig, but half way through the second set he caught wind of the pasties and made a beeline for the bag with the CDs in. I was mid-song at the time and both Nicola and I made an sudden and awkward lurch towards the impeding dog to save the pasties, about which the audience had no idea, so all they saw was Noodle head single-mindedly towards the bag next to me and Nicola and I leap out to stop him, thus enabling me to learn an interesting factoid about myself: I will stop whatever I’m doing to save a pasty in peril.

At the end of a highly enjoyable night, Jon and Liz were kind enough to give us some presents of chocolate, flowers… and a tin of baked beans for Nicola. You probably don’t need me to tell you how happy she was, but I think two tins of beans in two days emotionally exhausted her.

Huge thanks go to Jerry and Caroline for looking after us so well in their B&B, Gerard and Joy for the great homemade dinner and for having me to play at Bradninch Folk Club and to both audiences for being so much fun. Massive thanks to Nicola for coming with me for the mini-tour and providing the harmonies and general hilarity, and finally to John, Liz, Joe, Isaac, Laurie, Simon, Gabriel and Noodle the dog for inviting us, hosting a gig, going as far as to knock a whole wall down, looking after us so well!

I’m going to conclude this rather epic post with one of the images that Nicola and I found on a calendar in Jon and Liz’s bathroom entitled, ‘Extraordinary Chickens’. I hope it didn’t seem too odd that we both went in the toilet to laugh at chickens:

Jon Williams (host): Can’t quite believe the gig just happened, but it deffo did and it was FABULOUS – you were AMAZING. Thanks ever so much for coming down here – had a top couple of days.