Live & Local - some dates for the diary

It seems that I haven't written so much about musical things taking place in Frome lately, so it is time for an update on some future events. For another view of the town I recommend this blog highly - Frome With A View.
Here, however, are some musical happenings that I am really looking forward to:

• Acoustic+ returns after its customary summer recess on 28 September and this is with its 10th Anniversary edition that features all four of the acts that performed at the first! For more on that aspect see here. It is at the Cheese & Grain, as usual, but the ticket price is the £1 of the original (donations are much encouraged).
• Sunday 21 October - The first Frome Blues Festival, organised by Seahorse Productions that is behind the Frome Folk Festival (of which see below). This is also at the Cheese & Grain.
• Saturday 24 November - Sean Lakeman and Kathyrn Roberts. They were just amazing at Frome Folk Festival 2012 but this time are appearing at Rook Lane Chapel.
• Saturday/Sunday 17/18 February - Frome Folk Festival 2013, the second edition of this event. An announcement of the firsts acts and artists who will be appearing is coming very soon and tickets are already on sale both locally, from the Cheese and Grain Box Office, and also through well known on-line sellers; these latter tend, however, to add a booking fee. If you want, and of course only if you can sensibly do so, the cheapest way is almost always to pay in cash at the Cheese & Grain box office. It offers real-time on-line ticketing, so there is no waiting and wondering if and when they will turn up in the mail. There is no booking fee either, for cash purchases. On the other hand it is up to you not to misplace them!

Karine Polwart - Live @ Rook Lane Chapel, Frome

Following on from the success of the first Frome Folk Festival came the first visit to Frome of Scottish singer-songwriter Karine Polwart. Rook Lane Chapel is a wonderful venue and absolutely ideal for concerts such as this and there was nothing to disappoint a near sell-out audience. Support was provided by an up-coming artist from Bath, Beth Porter, who was playing solo (rather than with her varied-in-composition backing group 'The Availables') but that did not did not detract from the performance one bit.  Songs such as murder ballad 'Salty Water' are good in whatever format they are played. She announced that her début album is on course for release before the end of the year; there is an EP 'Red Floor #3' already released.
  
Karine and her two accomplices, her brother Steven and multi-instrumentalist Inge Thomson (originally from Fair Isle, no less), provided a lengthy and stellar set.

As well as the expected favourites it notably included at least five tracks that will be on her forthcoming fifth studio album: 'Traces' is due for release on August 13. Judging from what we heard yesterday evening it is going to be rather special and most certainly not apolitical. That is something artists only tend to do when they feel comfortable and the audience is already on-side, which it clearly was as demonstrated by two encores - the second of which was a audience sing-along cover of Abba's 'Waterloo'.
  
There were a couple of solo numbers and this one is Inge singing a traditional Shetland song accompanying herself on piano accordion.

Frome Festival 2011 - Launch Party

The opening gambit was the launch party, held at Rook Lane Chapel, on Thursday evening. It was quite some event and to begin it were two artists that have featured in these posts before.

Barbara J Hunt (guitar and vocals) and Dizzi (percussion and dulcimer).

  

 The dulcimer appeared of course, not least because she has just released her own signature model, as did the hang drums.

  

The Frome Festival is not just about music, far from it, although that is mostly where my interest lies. I have however mentioned that Frome has a wide range of independent shops and one amongst them actually has a poet-in-residence.  Here she is...

...welcome to the (largely imaginary) world of Muriel Lavender.

  

From Frome's industrious Freecycle community to, via the topic of Marks and Spencer Food advertising, and the contents of Dervla Kirwan's fridge, not much was spared the searchlight. It was funny and then some... now I understand why there is a whole poetry arena at Latitude. If it is half as good as this I might have to check it out this coming weekend.

Local politics was mentioned too (there is no longer any music in Wiltshire, apparently) and one of this event's main organisers, Leander Morales, lives just across the border. A regular feature on the Frome scene, as Morales Watts, they were joined by a violinist for this set.

For the most part they play original material but, this once, included a seemingly improbable cover song as a sing-along. It worked. People sang! It was song that, thanks to The Animals' version of 'House of The Rising Sun', is one that almost everybody has some knowledge of and not least because this iconic version topped the singles chart in UK, USA and Canada. What is lost in this is that the song is a traditional one and it could easily have become extinct in the canon were it not for some recordings of local singers made in East Kentucky several decades before.
It is a recurring theme, one that Cecil Sharp well understood in relation to English folk dance and song.
  
Then there were some short films, conceived and produced by students at Frome College. They were very good too but do not lend themselves to still photography.

Next was Benji Kirkpatrick, one member of the recently all-conquering Bellowhead. Frome Cheese & Grain is again to be visited by the whole ensemble on Friday 25, November. The solo set was a rather different, and very personal, affair. The patter was excellent which, when faced with a guitar that goes out of tune and breaks strings, is some trial. I now want to hear some of the recorded solo material, much of which is about travelling.

This eight-string instrument and his 5-string banjo had no such tendencies.

He said, about the banjo, that apart from the accordion few instruments are less liked. In my world, and that of many others that I know on both sides of the Atlantic, this could be hardly be further from the truth. He then proceeded to play a Jimi Hendrix cover on it. Give me some time and I will remember which song it was!

Last up was Luke Concannon. Of course there was the 'JCB Song', as it was his to play as one of Nizlopi, (and as he reminded us, it kept fellow Irishmen Westlife from the #1 spot in the UK singles chart) but the rest was equally genius. If you want a party - and surely Ireland could use any excuse for one these days - then he was up for it. 

Who needs amplification and all that stuff anyway? I wonder if the staff at the venue thought it might never end...

Real - Martha Tilston live at Rook Lane Chapel

I have mentioned the album Real - Live at Union Chapel before. It is amazing but only half as good as the real deal.  Imagine then my delight when I discovered, some weeks ago now, that Martha Tilston was including Frome's Rook Lane Chapel on her itinerary.

This is what happens when the late Victorian Gothic revival of Union Chapel is replaced with very early 18th century 'reformist' architecture.
Is this sacrilege? Hell, no! this building had served its original purpose for more than a quarter of a millennium before it was left to go to ruin - only then to come back again.
  

Rook Lane Chapel is simultaneously Frome's oldest and most modern live arts venue and, needless to say, the music and performance were quite equal to the challenge.  For those that weren't able to be there new songs were performed - perhaps three or four, come to think of it in retrospect.
  

Yes there was banter, there was chat with the audience, but in the silences you could have heard a pin drop and for all the right reasons.
And then there was the encore...

Arts venues.

Frome is, for a town of approximately 25,500 inhabitants, blessed with a remarkable selection of arts venues, both for static displays and performance arts.  In the latter category the Cheese and Grain, capacity 800 and hopefully soon to be augmented in both capacity and facilities, is the most versatile if not particularly architecturally distinguished. It is a 19th century produce-market hall that has been adapted many times since. Frome also has two theatres, The Memorial Theatre completed in 1924 in memory of those killed in the Great War and the more recent Merlin Theatre, which seats about 250 and is part of the Frome College campus. All three are used for all kinds of performance arts and other live shows.
Then there are many historic pubs, some of which regularly feature live music: amongst those most active are The Griffin and The Olive Tree (link currently broken, phone 01373 467140) and also many other venues that are used from time to time, most notably for the annual Frome Festival - taking place this year from 8 - 17 July.
One however, that survives at all more by luck than judgement, is the most architecturally significant and spectacular by a long mile.  Built when Frome was a town very wealthy indeed, based on the wool trade, it spent 251 years in continuous use as a non-conformist place of worship before it was declared redundant and then spent the next quarter of a century falling into decay. It was eventually compulsorily purchased by the local authority and restored.
It now houses, appropriately enough, an architects' practise in the ante-rooms while the main section is used as a space for static and performance arts both traditional and modern by the trust Rook Lane Arts.

As well as being an early example of such a building on a grand scale the bountiful finance saw to it that it did not have the minimalist functionality of many and that its patrons succumbed to more than a flourish of the baroque. Nobody - whose mission was truly to live the life of an ascetic - would ever have sanctioned windows like those!
When it was built John Wesley certainly wasn't preaching simplicity and sobriety to the masses in open-air sermons across Britain, such as became his trademark, not least because he was then only a toddler (b. June 28, 1703)!
   
I'm not the religious kind in any traditional sense but wish to thank those that were for the venue.