NORTHUMBRIAN MUSIC
NIGHTS
What we said about
'Stuff the
Turkey'
Cheerful Organisation pays off at NYE
Extravaganza
concert in Allendale
It was a baker's dozen of exciting entertainers for the New Year's Eve musical extravaganza upstairs at the King's Head, as revellers waited for the traditional tar bar'l parade and bonfire in Allendale.
With so many entertainers primed to put on their very best show of the year, it took a bit of organising to ensure that everybody got a chance to participate. But still the organisers managed to squeeze everybody (and audience) into the intimate room, with a cheerful fire hotly blazing in anticipation of its bigger brother, and fit in a buffet, a raffle, and an unanticipated shaggy-dog story too. It was amazing the show finished in time to join the revelry outside!
Take a handful of fiddles, add in voices high and low or older and younger, a pair of flutes, a clutch of guitars, a Celtic harp, a brace of pipes, an accordian, a concertina, a banjo, bodhran, a tin whistle, a set of shakey eggs and a smile -- mix them all up for a wonderful evening of music shared. That's a recipe for enjoyment, if you can keep the chaos at bay -- but if music is anything it's a controlled chaos, isn't it -- so it must have felt a bit musical just putting the entire programme together.
But perhaps the best thing about the night was the good cheer with which performers and audience alike enjoyed themselves. And why not, when some of Tynedale's best entertainers were on tap with a song, a tune, a joke or an anecdote, to share a harmony, a hum or a sway or a sympathetic tap-a-tap-tap on the table tops.
I can't imagine why anybody would want to spend the last moments of the millenium in the company of anybody else but their friends, and so it turned out in Allendale, for what had to be one of the most civilised and life-enriching extravaganzas of participative enjoyment anywhere in the land.
