We went to the Harwich Electric Palace again last night. It's beginning to become a habit, so much so that the Systems Administrator joked that maybe we should join. We were not there this time to see a film, but for a folk concert. The Electric Palace had booked John Kirkpatrick, a giant of the English folk scene who has been around for over three decades. He does an excellent Christmas show, which I saw at the Colchester Arts Centre some years back with my dad. It was so good, I wanted to take the SA, but the next time he came round to Colchester the gig was cancelled due to snow. Suddenly, browsing through the Electric Palace's website, I saw that they'd bagged him.
It was not a well publicised concert. The owner of Harwich's very nice Thai restaurant, where we had an early supper before the show, expressed surprise that we were off the Electric Palace, given that Wednesday is not a film night, and remained politely sceptical when we said we were going to a concert, since it wasn't on their December flyer. However, when we got there, the grille in front of the lobby was open, and there was a small, cheerful queue. By the time it got to eight o'clock, there was a respectable turnout, though the cinema was by no means full. Most people seemed to know at least some of their fellow audience members, and it was clearly a community event, with raffle prizes laid out on a table in front of the stage, and a little boy running round and round the auditorium.
Having not been to a folk evening before, we didn't know what to expect, and whether there would be a support act or if we'd get the man himself at eight. There was a prequel, an acapella quartet singing American hymns. There was rather a lot of humming and pointing before each number, and I think they need to practice starting off a bit more. You need to launch right in with conviction and gusto for that sort of thing. The youngest of the four was an extremely pretty and lively teenage girl with a very expressive face, who might just turn out to be East Anglia's follow up to Ed Sheeran. You never know.
John Kirkpatrick had only brought three of the six squeezeboxes he is shown posing in front of on his website, plus a genuine orchestral triangle, but was as good as ever, and sang our favourite songs from his Christmas album Carolling and Crumpets, especially the one about the Christmas pudding, as well as some winter songs I hadn't heard him do before. I'm not sure how many of the audience were dedicated folkies, and how many were supporters of the Electric Palace who thought they would like to hear some Christmas music, but everybody seemed happy enough.
They got the little boy to draw the raffle tickets, and he bellowed Yellow to the massed audience with great confidence, when asked by the raffle organiser (my guess is she was his granny) what colour the winning ticket was, but fell down on the numbers, since the only number he seemed to know was five. There again, she told us, he was only three. I won the last prize in the raffle, a packet of crumpets, which saved me the agony of choice. The little boy presented them to me with great solemnity. He'd been very eager to give them to one of the earlier winners, but the chap wanted the bottled beer.
I had a couple for breakfast, thinking how much I liked crumpets. The chickens did pretty well out of our evening as well, since the restaurant owner asked us whether we wanted a doggy bag for any of our leftovers, so I came home with a box of fragrant jasmine Thai rice for them.
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