18 March 2026

Bob Fox

On Wednesday, 18th March, our guest at the Carrington Triangle was Bob Fox from Seaham, a former coal mining town, about six miles south of Sunderland, hence he specialises in songs from the North East.
After the usual half hour of floor singers, Bob moved onto the ‘stage’ with an ease of manner, immediately engaging with the audience through interesting and amusing stories and song introductions, He began with My Love is in America by Chris Leslie, a wistful, haunting song about a young man whose girlfriend is forced to leave him in order to emigrate to the States with her father. This was followed by a song about the Sunderland naval hero, Jack Crawford, sometimes called The Hero of Camperdown. It tells the story of how he ‘nailed his colours to the mast’ during that battle in 1797.
The third song, The Year Turns Round Again, was from the theatre production of War Horse, in which Bob appeared as Song Man, followed by another song from that production, Learning to Plough, where Joey the horse had to be taught how to ‘ plough a good furrow’ for a Devon village competition.
Bob told us that he had to learn to play the melodeon for War Horse, and had one made in Gateshead to look like an early twentieth century instrument (Just a bit of info for melodeon enthusiasts!).

Towards the end of the first set came a song by Jez Lowe called Greek Lightening about a couple trying to get by on benefits, dreaming of a holiday in the Greek islands, but having to settle for day trips to Roker and Whitley Bay. As a northerner myself, I don’t happen to think those choices were a bad alternative, but a life on benefits is not much fun.
Bob began his second set with Champion at Keeping Them Rolling about old-style long distance lorry drivers. It was written by Ewan MacColl, and Bob did mention, in his humorous way, that Ewan, who was really English pretending to be Scottish, sang as a Geordie (well, why not ?!).
Peppers and Tomatoes was next, a political song by Ralph McTell referring to how the Orthodox Serbians and Catholic Croats got along with each other until Serbia, supported by Russia, went to war, intent on divide and conquer tactics.
The Whitby Tailor was a rather quirky music hall song in which a shy young man, trying to date a young woman, suggests, after too many drinks, that they swap clothes. He ends up half naked while she runs off in his trousers, the pocket containing all his money!
Bob followed with such well-known Geordie songs as The Bonny Gateshead Lass, When the Boat Comes In, The Lampton Worm and The Water of Tyne, ending this very entertaining evening with ‘ Big River’ by Jimmy Nail, another well-known Geordie.
Inspired by Bob’s mention that Sunderland people were not Geordies but Mackems, I did a bit of research into these names. Apparently Mackem originates from Sunderland’s shipbuilding heritage, ‘we mack’em and they tack’em’, meaning, of course, ‘we make the ships and they take them out’. The name Geordie, on the other hand, possibly originates from the support Tynesiders gave to King George 2nd, during the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, or perhaps the nickname for local coal miners who used safety lamps or ‘geordie lamps’ as designed by George Stephenson. There is much rivalry between Geordies and Mackems, stemming from sides taken during the Civil War, industrial competition and football teams.
Just thought you might like to know all that.
Yes, it was, in Geordie-speak, a champion night, having that canny lad back after a ten year gap. We all enjoyed his many chorus-songs, his powerful – and at times very passionate – singing, skillful guitar work, his melodeon playing, and well, his northernness!

Floor singers Matt Blick and Phil Harrison — Great floor singers again: Matt Blick and Phil Harrison, even cooler than usual

Maureen McGuinness, on behalf of Carrington Triangle folk club.

18 February 2026

Paul Carbuncle Album Launch

This month’s guest was Paul Carbuncle, launching his new CD Reverse Canterbury Pleasure. The title is the name of a peal of bells: you can interpret it as you wish.

Paul has connections across a much wider social activist and music scene than folk clubs like ours, so he attracted a wide range of admirers. Often it’s the job of a guest performer to win over the audience and to provide some background and justification for their songs, but we were all on Paul’s side (and knew a fair few of the songs) right from the start, so he just got on with the music, and gave us two well-filled sets – 29 songs in all. Many were from the new record (Drinking Money, My Name is Dessie Warren, A Tree Song), but there were welcome favourites like Cookie’s Old Cries of Nottingham (with a tribute to Cookie’s help in recording and performing on the CD), Pig Farmer, Isambard, Deport First, The Mermaid (with Blossom demonstrating the ‘three times round’ bit), Ben Kenobi….

Paul’s performances are always powerful and impressive. His singing is beautifully clear, so it’s possible to make out every word (a skill that’s not that common, unfortunately), and, more importantly, he conveys the meaning of every word, too – and all the songs have a message or a story. His guitar style is quite idiosyncratic, and often fast and furious, but the power and vigour of this playing can be deceptive: it’s not all sound and fury. His left hand is wonderfully dexterous up and down the fingerboard, and the right hand is really precise, as well as rapid.

The CDs Paul brought sold fast, and he was kept busy in the interval with a queue of people wanting them signed (if you missed your chance, CDs and downloads are on Bandcamp). There were mugs and T-shirts available, too. There was already someone wearing a T-shirt by the beginning of the second half.

At the end of the night, Paul had difficulty getting away, because of the queue of people waiting to tell him what a great evening it had been. They were right.

Phil Harrison and Rob Duley, two of our excellent collection of floor singers

Hugh Miller

21st January 2026

Reg Meuross

This is the fourth time Reg Meuross has been to the Carrington Triangle and more than ever I am struck by how lucky we are to have such a major artist at our little folk club. Reg seems to be able to write great songs about a huge variety of subjects and he makes each song hit home with real emotion.

He started off the first set with three songs from his latest song cycle Fire and Dust, which is about the life and songs of Woody Guthrie. Pete Townsend from The Who had the idea of drawing a direct line between Guthrie and Dylan up to Meuross (he produced the LP) and in these songs you can see that Reg is a worthy bearer of their torch. The first song, Fire and Dust, starts off with the verse,

You are the voice you are the call
You are the word of one and all
You who know a lesson learned
in fire upon your heart is burned.

Fire played a tragic part in Woody’s life and dust refers to the dust bowl where he was brought up and wrote many songs about. In the next song A Folk Song’s a Song, Reg sings

Hey hey Woody Guthrie I made you this song
from the words you’ve been saying
and the tunes you have sung
I wrote it to say we’ve been listening to you
from those who have been having
some hard travelling too.

The last song from Fire and Dust was the Gypsy Singer, sung in the voice of Bob Dylan when he went to see Woody Guthrie in hospital dying of Huntington’s Chorea in 1961. It’s a haunting, lyrical account -masterly songwriting.
Reg sings in a distinctive tenor voice — and fingerpicks and strums his 1940s Martin guitar in a non-flashy way that never gets in the way of the lyrics. He talks to the audience fluently and warmly between songs, telling us lots of stories about his life and about the songs he’s singing.
After telling us a lovely story about his Appalachian dulcimer called Dave he sang the song I am a Fish-house Woman from his Hull trawler disaster cycle.
He then told us about how he wrote the song cycle Stolen from God (2022) which is about the pernicious slave trade between the 17th and the 19th centuries. He sang Good Morning Mr. Colston (which has become a classic) and ended the first set with I Bought Myself an African. Both songs employ a biting sardonic humour in the English satirical tradition:

Their purpose is to labour for your need
Sanctioned by his holiness, by royalty decreed
and it’s the right of every English man
… so I bought myself an African.

Reg started off the second set with two much more personal songs – the Shoreline and the Sea and Jealous– both show that he is just as adept with emotions as with social and political subjects. He continued with another classic, Angel in a Blue Dress, a paean to an NHS nurse. He also sang Leaving Alabama, Cry a New Song and I Believe in You.
He finished with another all-time classic, England Green and England Grey — one of the only songs I know that captures our ambivalence towards a country so beautiful and so marred by corporate and capitalist greed.
This was an inspiring and inspiriting performance, delivered with warmth, humanity and passion and we all sang the encore Shine On with, I like to think, similar passion!

‘Shine on like a diamond in the mine
Shine on like the spirit of mankind’.

Mike Wareham

Wednesday 10th December

Wednesday 17th December

Carrington Triangle Christmas Party

Usual time. Free admission. Bring some snacks to share.
No raffle, but if you bring a small wrapped present you can join in the tombola.
Christmas jumpers will not be barred.
Don’t forget Notts Alliance on 10th December, as well.

(No meetings 24^th and 31^st December: see you January)

Previous guests: 12 November

Doug Eunson & Sarah Matthews

Doug and Sarah are longstanding Derbyshire artists who had been our guests before Covid, so longstanding members expected a mix of traditional songs and dance tunes, some of them by Sarah and Doug. They have had 30 years of playing together in ceilidhs and folk clubs, which showed in their clear introductions and well-planned set list. The Taoist Tale from Doug, a song by Tucker Zimmerman about the uncertainty of luck, was followed by hornpipes and the Child ballad Willy’s Lady where Sarah shone.

They soon let us join choruses of In Praise of Alcohol, a Robert Service poem, and the 16^th century Jolly Good Ale and Old. We had dance tunes from Belgium and France, Orange in Bloom and a lovely tune written by Chris Wood. Sarah followed the Thomas Raine song Fourpence a Day with her composition Gathering Round about the joy of participation in celebration. When we asked for an encore, they gave us the Padstow May Song which let us finish the night with a rich chorus.

Previous guests: 15 October 25

Culverake

**Lizzie Hardingham. Matt Quinn, and Seb Stone**

Culverake are the trio of Lizzie Hardingham, Seb Stone and Matt Quinn. They sing unaccompanied, with a high proportion of traditional songs. We had been impressed by their set at the Gate to Southwell Festival earlier in the year, and were pleased to invite them to the club.
They gave us a splendid set, starting at high intensity with a May Song in which power from Matt and Seb was lifted by Lizzie’s bell-like top line.
Most of the songs they did for us are on their just-released album Unto the Sky. There were several unusual variations on well-known songs, like a Scots version of John Barleycorn, and Three Old Jolly Sportsmen, which started off as the well-known highwayman ballad Two Butchers, but then swerved off in an unexpected direction.

**Note ‘In The Roud’ flyers in the foreground**

Three-part harmony is Culverake’s feature style, dense, complex, and beautifully sung. All three are worth listening to as solo singers, though. This was apparent in one- or two-line solo parts in the arrangements and in the melody leads, which were shared among all three. Examples were Seb’s beautifully clear and gentle lead in You Lads and Lasses, a version of Seeds of Love, Matt in Down by the Seaside, an incomplete broken token song (doubly broken, I guess), and, in particular, Lizzie on Rolling Down to Old Maui. She sang it with a lovely varied and dancing rhythm and bluesy touches, which really lifted what is sometimes a rather stolid belt-it-out song. Great.
I loved the harmonies (I have always loved vocal harmony, right back to Peter, Paul and Mary and Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares), but I would also have enjoyed hearing a bit more solo singing from each of them.
Another of Culverake’s strengths is clear diction. It’s important to hear the words.
Matt gave us plenty of detail about source singers and variants of the songs. Not surprising, given the great depth of information in his podcast In the Roud, which is a series of really valuable in-depth analyses by experts of songs in the Roud Index – well worth following up on YouTube or other podcast sites. He’d put out flyers on our tables: I hope some of them were taken away and followed up. Our ballad group has found the series very useful.

**Lizzie and Seb relax while Matt gives the lowdown on the next song**

The intensity they started with was maintained to the last, even in gentle songs like Sweet Thames Flow Softly. They ending with bouncing through Mike and Lal Waterson’s Rubber Band as an encore.

As usual on guest nights, we had a few floor singers to start off each half. It’s good that we have a collection of excellent and reliable singers, like ‘The Old Flames’ (Mike and Jane), Sarah Farrell, and Phil Hind, who can give those who come for the guest nights a positive impression of the club in general.

Our next guests will be Sarah Matthews and Doug Eunson on the 12^th November. They’ll be great, too.

Hugh Miller

Recent Guests: 8th October 2025

Bryony Griffith & Alice Jones

On 17th September 2025, Bryony Griffith and Alice Jones treated us to a most enjoyable evening of fine vocal harmonies and varied instrumentation. Alice switched back and forth between tenor guitar (declared a ‘Tena guitar’ at one point) and harmonium, while Bryony’s fiddle-playing mixed bowing with plenty of effective plucking. The pair also performed a fair few songs a cappella.
The theme throughout was Yorkshire, Yorkshire, Yorkshire, with material from the East, West, and North Ridings, and we were assiduously apprised of the names of the song-collectors to whom we owed each offering. Honourable mentions went to Mary and Nigel Huddleston, Frank Hinchliffe, and Margaret Moorson. ‘The second best collector’ was deemed to be Anne Gilchrist of L*ncashire (the gasps were almost audible). But let there be no doubt: of all collectors, Frank Kidson of Leeds was the best! Among his source-singers was his own mother, whence this evening’s version of ‘The Grey Mare’ as absorbed in Otley in the 1820s.
Yorkshire directness was evident in the immediate confession of fratricide in ‘What Is That Blood On Thy Shirt Sleeve?’ (a.k.a. ‘Edward’), Yorkshire understatement in the ‘watery misfortune’ of ‘Strawberry Tower’ (a.k.a. ‘The Drowned Sailor’), and Yorkshire parsimony in the omission of a chorus in ‘Young Banker’ (a.k.a. one of the greatest English chorus songs). Not that we were short of other chances to sing along – ‘The Cropper lads for me!’ delighted one’s inner Luddite, ‘Early Pearly’ alias ‘Hayley Paley’ gave us a pleasing splash of sentimentality, and ‘Take her an onion!’ seemed a most appropriate mondegreen to shout in the tale of the wife who performs every task badly (‘Willy Went To Westerdale’).
Both Alice and Bryony gave us plenty of background information and historical context for their song choices, useful in the main though your reviewer is still reeling from the claim that Huddersfield ‘didn’t really exist until the Industrial Revolution’. Did not Godwine have six carucates of land taxable where eight ploughs were possible? How short folk memory can be. Wonderful harmonies made amends.

A particular highlight of the evening was the impressive display of Alice’s hamboning skills on ‘My Johnny Was A Shoemaker’, incorporating stamps, pops, thumb-clicks, chest-beats, and much slapping of the Slapping-Pants™. Many of us have since incorporated these devices into our own performances on weekly singers’ nights, albeit without the spangly attire.
We were all relieved to learn that Alice does not have syphilis.

Paul Cullen

Recent guests: Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne 16 July

Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne

Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne’s powerful and intense singing, brilliant musicianship, wide choice of material, and rapport with the audience left us captivated, a bit amazed, and maybe a little stunned (he is satisfyingly loud) last Wednesday evening.
He was playing anglo concertina and a hybrid converted melodeon-accordion based on a pre-war Hohner Lucia, which gave melodeon-style punch and drive on the right hand but a full range of bass chords, which he used very effectively, on the left. Effectively an instrumental hot rod.
Almost all his material was traditional, ranging from classic early twentieth-century songs collected by people like Lucy Broadwood and Ralph Vaughan Williams, through to striking material from his latest CD, Play Up The Music, a collection of English-origin songs as sung in the Caribbean and by African-American artists in the USA. This included Pretty Little Sailor, a version of Soldier, Soldier, Won’t You Marry Me? which many of us learned at school, and a mesmerisingly powerful version of Little Musgrove.

The depth and range of his instrumental playing was wonderful. On the melodeon, he started the evening with a lively and powerful version of two country dance tunes and then moved on to a representation of some Welsh fiddle tunes from a player who ‘knew a lot of notes, and was determined to play every single one of them’ (and Cohen showed us just what that meant). On the concertina he gave us ‘a sailor’s hornpipe, as it would have been arranged by J.S.Bach’ – completely convincing, very funny, and a virtuoso performance – followed by his own very moving Fantasia on a West Indian Burial based on the songs traditionally sung at funerals to help to guide the souls of the dead back to their home in Africa.
It wasn’t just an evening of varied songs, powerful singing and wonderful playing. He was very much with us as an audience. Many of his songs had choruses or refrains, which suited the club’s good reputation for chorus singing, and for almost every piece he gave us informative, interesting, amusing and sometimes touching introductions and explanations. Both sets were closed off with just the right kind of rousing finales: a less-than-serious music hall song from Vesta Tilley in the first half, and a remarkable concertina piece, ending with whirling the instrument round his head to use the Doppler Effect to imitate the sound of bells, at the end of the evening. Good stuff.

Go and see him again if you can, either solo or in the group Granny’s Attic, with George Sansome and Lewis Wood (who are playing at Gunthorpe Village Hall in November).

Hugh Miller for the committee

Recent Guests: Clarke Camilleri 11 June

The welcome return of Clarke Camilleri to the Carrington Triangle proved to be a delightful evening.

Clarke actually joined the club in 2016 and became a regular performer here, where, with a background in the blues, he was introduced to British traditional music. Since then he has travelled widely, both as a solo artist and with other musicians, including Angeline Morrison’s band. He features on her award-winning album, The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience.
Clarke has returned as an experienced and charismatic performer, very much at ease with the audience, who responded warmly to his excellent musicianship, stories and humour, even enjoying the times he interrupted himself with bursts of laughter during a couple of his songs! We were delighted to welcome him back.
He brought with him two guitars, a banjo and a harmonium. He began the evening with Anji on guitar, followed by Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, an anti-war song by Ed McCurdy. Worried Man’s Blues came next, a traditional song recorded in 1930 by the Carter Family, based on the post-Civil War era when plantation owners, still on the lookout for cheap labour, were keen to get black men arrested for the slightest offence to work in chain-gangs.
Clarke performed several British folk songs, a couple by Cyril Tawney, and MacColl’s ‘Shoals of Herring’. He also included a Beatles, and a Dylan song. Before he sang Bert Jansch’s arrangement of Blackwaterside, he told us that he first heard it played here by a regular performer Phil Harrison, who was also in attendance that night.

At one point in the evening, he brought onto the stage Jinda Biant, a blues/folk musician and a ‘best mate’ who accompanied him in a song called Nice to meet you Syrilla, a very lively and fun experience, seemingly, for both of them, and also for us!
I haven’t yet mentioned Clarke’s original songs. Several that he sang are on his 2020 album, The Rollin’ Hills of Home. The title song is about his walks in the Peak District with his mother and brother. The Spirit is an inspiring song about not allowing the establishment to crush us. The spirit will always rise again! Keep the World Singing Round reminds us that no matter what awful things are happening in the world, singing can help bring people together in solidarity.
In conclusion, I found Clarke’s performance entertaining, joyful, and full of messages in relation to justice and fairness, and a desire to make the world a better, kinder place for us all.

Maureen McGuinness, on behalf of Carrington Triangle folk club

Our next guest is Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne on 16 July

Carrington Triangle Folk Club

Every Wednesday at The Gladstone, 45 Loscoe Road, Carrington, Nottingham, NG5 2AW.