NORTHUMBRIAN MUSIC
NIGHTS
What we said about
Thrice Brewed
Thrice Brewed
Good is good enough
Saturday evening, mid-January in Tynedale. What are you going to do? Well I look through the 'What's On' guide in the paper too, and sometimes I wonder, what is good enough to entice me away from my warm cozy house of a cold and frosty evening?
'There's got to be live music somewhere, to warm the heart, let's see. Oh, here's a good local band, full of enthusiasm, why not try that?' Such might have been the approach of the full house at the King's Head in Allendale last Saturday night, as the crowd waited patiently for Thrice Brewed to entertain. With an unexpected bonus of Music Night regular Ian Brown featuring on a delightful guitar instrumental, and then an ode to Romeo & Juliet, before the main act, it looked like a warm and cozy home-away-from-home night.
And zinging in on a nice crashing instrumental introduction, Thrice Brewed took to the stage, featuring Angelien Baty on flute with Greg Smith on guitar, Bob McMillan on guitar and accordian, Paul McGreevy on mandolin and David Moody on drums. Throughout the entire performance, the bass guitar was nimbly passed around amongst all front four, who also shared in lead vocals. It was a family night of sharing songs, memories and cheerful tunes, and it was definitely good enough.
Covering songs like Billy Joel's 'Leningrad', or Runrig's 'Protect and Survive', the band didn't really rouse the audience until 'The Mighty Atlantic', with its echoes of lost Scottish fishermen at sea, and Dougie Maclean's marvelous number 'Feels so near' sent the goose flesh prickling and a warm feeling spread throughout the room.
By the time we got to that Bushbury's favourite, 'Sixty Percent Proof', we were all glad we'd jumped in the car and made the pilgrimage to Allendale, the home of intimate live music in Tynedale. And it was such a treat to enjoy the band enjoying the gig -- audiences often fail to appreciate how important they themselves are to a live show, but this was one night where a superlative audience pushed the quality up a notch or two, and that special reverberating cycle of appreciation and answering sparkle in performance really showed.
After the break, the songs tumbled out, from 'The old maid in the garret' to 'The Hiring', and including the requisite folky homesickness theme as in Eric Bogle's 'The hills of home'. By the time we'd done 'All for my Geordie' and a reprise of another Bushbury's classic 'You're not my brother', we were quite ready to weep along with Angelien's crystal clear high notes for 'The bonny bonny banks of Loch Lomond'.
All in all, a good night, and what more could anyone ask, of a cold indifferent weekend evening deep in a frozen wilderness?
