Lynn Goulbourn and Steve Hicks were our hugely entertaining guests on 12th March 2025. It was something of a nostalgic return for Lynn, who had been a club regular in the 1980s. Her Gren Blatherwick moped anecdote was much appreciated.
Numerous Hicks-made instruments were in evidence. Steve treated us to a splash of Turlough O’Carolan on a guitar that Lynn assured us “he’s just knocked up”, and she introduced us to Nashville tuning (E A D G up an octave + standard B E) on a Hicks mini-guitar. Possibly the ukulele upon which Steve (supposedly beginners-level) shredded later in the evening was also a Hicks product. One suspects he even hand-crafted the coconuts which clip-clopped us through ‘Black Hills of Dakota’.
The room was packed and in good voice. The chance to join in on the call-and-response gospel blues of ‘Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning’ was very eagerly seized.
US-derived material made up a sizeable portion of the evening’s delicious fare, from Lead Belly’s ‘Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie’ to John Prine’s ‘The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness’ via the trad children’s songs ‘Polly Wolly Doodle’ and ‘Shortnin’ Bread’ (the latter morphing into Scott Joplin’s ‘The Entertainer’) and a roaring version of ‘Saint James Infirmary’ with more hi-de-hoes than Cab Calloway (though slightly fewer dance steps). Steve’s extraordinary guitar-playing was mesmerizing as he paid tribute fingerstyle to Duck Baker and effortlessly merged the oldtime bluegrass of ‘Ragtime Annie’ with ‘Angeline the Baker’.
Lynn sang ‘Fear a’ Bhàta’ in impressively capable Scottish Gaelic, and turned the Geordie up to 11 for ‘The Lambton Worm’ [rhymes with storm]. Steve delivered some wonderful Canadian poetry in Bruce Cockburn’s mixed spoken-word-n-song ‘Three Al Purdys’, and played a beautiful guitar-adaption of the South African composer Abdullah Ibrahim’s piano piece ‘The Wedding’.
For variety and dexterity the duo are hard to beat. If we learnt one thing this evening, it’s that talent can outplay arthritis. If we learnt a second thing, it’s that Jesus was a Geordie.

Our next guest is Brian Peters, on 9 April.

It’s rare for a guest to be booked solely on their YouTube videos but we did just this for Holly Clarke and it was amply justified.

She began with the traditional ‘The Maid of Kilmore’, then ‘John Barleycorn’ as sung by Bert Lloyd, but then sang ‘The Unseen Guide’ which she had set to music from a poem written in her native Coniston to explain how the first Mountain Rescue Team began. In singing a Danish ballad (in English) followed by ‘The Lakes of Coolfin’ she showed her scope of influences. She closed her first set with ‘Wild, Feral & Free’ which she had composed using the shapeshifting Reynardine story as a hook for her experience of becoming confident in her own skin. Despite an autism diagnosis, she graduated in 2018 from the Traditional Music Degree course at Newcastle University.

In her next set Holly followed her composition ‘The Spectral Stag’ with Chris Wood & Hugh Lupton’s song ‘Bleary Winter’. She sang 3 more traditional songs ‘John Randall’, ‘Bonny Woodhall’ and ‘Young Collins’ with confident explanations of their origins, and one that she learned from Nick Dow ‘Burd Margaret’ that he believed was written by an Irish traveller. It was a joyous evening with varied contributions from nine floor singers and well worth the tenner!