Tag Archives: concertina

Mike Hebbert, Pip Ives, Ruairidh Greig, Will Duke

Upcoming visiting guests at the Unicorn session, Marden

The free tune and song evenings at The Unicorn, Marden start at 8pm on the last Sunday of the month and are open to everyone: just pull up a seat and listen or bring a song, a tune, a story, or a dance.

We say the agenda is ‘trad, old fashioned and entertaining’.

We always have visiting friends to bring something a little different to the entertainment, so here’s our schedule for winter and spring:

29th January: Pip Ives Tunes and songs from a widely admired melodeon and anglo concertina player. (You may also recognise him from his day job at Hobgoblin in Canterbury.)
26th February: Will Duke Will is a fabulous anglo concertina player and singer with an interesting repertoire drawn mainly from Sussex. He’s also an entertaining performer possessed of an excellent dry wit, so expect to be amused into the bargain…
26th March: Mike Hebbert Mike’s a Jeffries duet concertina maestro with a cheeky grin and an old fashioned and entertaining repertoire you might not expect — but which may remind you of the BBC Light Programme.
30th April: Ruairidh Greig It’s great to have Ruairidh back again — he’s a proper scholar of the songs of his home county of Lincolnshire, some collected by Ruairidh himself. Expect to hear material we don’t often come across in the South East of England.

Annie Dearman and Steve Harrison, Artists at Frittenden

Annie Dearman and Steve Harrison sing and play at the Frittenden Festival

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Annie Dearman and Steve Harrison

We’re delighted to be able to present Annie Dearman and Steve Harrison at this year’s Frittenden Old Fashioned Night Out. We don’t see them very often in this corner of the country, but they’re a high class act, and Annie’s terrific voice and considered way of working with a song are sure to impress anyone who sees them perform.

Singer Annie and Steve (melodeon, mouthorgan, anglo-concertina) perform traditional songs in a robust and firmly-rooted English style. They take their songs from traditional singers, the folk song collectors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, manuscript books of past performers of traditional music, printed ballad sheets, and songs and tunes they happen to hear and like.

Annie is our Essex representative. She sang with several Essex-based a cappella groups in the 1970s and 1980s, and after moving to Yorkshire in 1990 she was a founder member of the voice workshop Making Waves, before teaming up in a duo with Vic Gammon in 1993. She wrote, directed and sang in the show The Weavers’ March (starring Pete Coe, Chris Coe and Vic), which was commissioned by the 1998 Ilkley Literature Festival.

Away from music, she is a freelance designer and maker of theatre costumes, backdrops and banners, and has recently completed several seasons’ work for the well known Mikron Theatre Company. Annie also designed and made the costumes for the Long Company mummers, who appear on the cover of Pete’s CD also titled Long Company.

Steve has lived in Yorkshire all his life. He played mouth organ, pipe and tabor, bagpipes, whistle and saxophone for the ceilidh bands Official Brawl and The Herb Boys, and has been musician for several morris and sword dance teams. He is a member of the Long Company mummers and currently leads the traditional English dance band The Black Box Band with Chris Coe, Alice Jones and Sue Coe. Away from music, he is a social scientist at the University of Manchester.

Annie & Steve are residents at the Ryburn 3-Step Folk Club in Ripponden, and with Vic, are Dearman, Gammon & Harrison, whose highly recommended CD Black Crow/White Crow was released not to long ago by the English Folk Dance & Song Society (EFDSS CD11).