Category Archives: Recent Guests

7 October: Virginia Kettle

Virginia Kettle, with John Kettle

Our guest on October 7^th was Virginia Kettle, one of the two lead singers, and one of the songwriters, in the festival favourites Merry Hell. For Carrington she performed with her husband John Kettle, also from Merry Hell.

Virginia and John Kettle playing guitars. Virginia is singing.

The first thing to say about Virginia is that she is a splendid performer with compelling stage presence and an immediate connection with the audience. She talked with us (not at us) about the origins and ideas of most of the songs with quiet, cheerful intensity. Her singing is great, of course, with wit and intelligence, but she is also able to pick up the enthusiasm and enjoyment of the audience and radiate it back with increased intensity. Her performance of Box of Diamonds near the end of the evening was a completely convincing ‘knock ’em down, drag ‘em out’ piece of bravura – not usual in a folk club, but it seemed just right.
John backed her up splendidly, with delicate guitar breaks when she gave him the nod. He sang two songs: the first-time-in-public Searching for Something I Cannot Own, and Merry Hell’s Lean On Me, which he wrote a long time ago during a lonely spell working as a songwriter in Nashville. I really like Lean On Me – the all-purpose support and comfort song (I sing it myself) – but I’d never heard John sing it, and it was moving against that backstory. It would have been good to hear more from John, but that would have meant less from Virginia, of course.
It’s unusual for me to review a session by a singer-songwriter. I’m not enthusiastic about most modern-composed ‘folk’ songs BUT I feel differently about Virginia’s songs. They’re not ‘folk’ for a start: they are quite personal. But personal in a way which involves us with her and reflects on our shared lives. In her songs, the world is tough and difficult (and sometimes our own personalities, too), but there is plenty of opportunity for hope, comfort, amusement – and sometimes joy. The effect of an evening of her songs is uplifting and encouraging.
[She also sings very clearly, so I could understand every word: appreciated by an old reviewer.]
Her songs cover a wide range of topics in a wide range of styles, and she’s good with words: mostly her lyrics sound like ordinary speech which just happens to fit the song (which is difficult to do), but there are occasional brilliant flashes like
‘Her friend Patricia, who looked like Morticia, and his friend John, who didn’t look like anyone’
(I like the rhythm change)
or ‘…holding it all together with the string from your vest’.
She sang a mix of songs from Rolling Folk (Virginia, John, Mark Wooley, Chris Lee, and Clare ‘Fluff’ Smith), from her solo record (No Place Like Tomorrow), and some from Merry Hell. There were several newly-composed, unrecorded songs. For two of the songs it was their first public performance.
There were songs about the joy and support of friendship: Rosanna’s Song and Lighter Shade of Blue; the importance of getting on with things, especially love, in later life: Tomorrow is not Promised and When You Know You Know; self-direction and recognizing self-worth: Sailing on the Inside, Made in the Stars and Box of Diamonds; and stories just there to be entertaining: Spy in a Previous Life.

Virginia Kettle playing drum and singing — Beating the drum in The Butter Song

For those of us who have been following Merry Hell for years there were several songs besides Rosanna’s Song, such as Don’t Say I, Say Us, reflecting Merry Hell’s continuing concern with solidarity over individualism. Here she successfully got what she rightly called ‘the small, compact and bijou’ audience singing three-part backing vocals to her lead. Carrington audiences should be proud of the quality of their chorus singing, both in volume and in musicality, and Virginia appreciated our support.
From Merry Hell there were also Build a Mansion (about what really matters in love) and The Butcher and the Vegan (a song of peaceful co-existence which includes accurate oystercatcher description). She ended with Bury Me Naked, an old favourite which she said was originally inspired by a Buddhist retreat, with its warning against accumulating ‘more shoes than anyone could possibly wear in one lifetime’. We all joined in.

We had some good performances from floor singers, as usual. I particularly liked Sarah Farrell’s beautifully quiet version of Don’t Sing Love Songs/Silver Dagger.

Sarah Farrell playing guitar — **Sarah Farrell**

A splendid evening: if you weren’t able to make it, you missed out.
Hugh Miller

Our next guests are Mick Ryan and Paul Downes on 28th October.
There are singarounds on all non-guest Wednesdays.

16 September: Honey & the Bear

Honey & the Bear

Well what an amazing evening!
The first thing we all saw as we came upstairs into the folk club wasn’t actually Lucy and Jon. They had assembled all their instruments and equipment on our ‘stage’ then gone out to eat.
The centre stage was occupied by a double bass, at the sides of which stood two guitars, a ukulele and a bouzouki, whilst the floor was covered with a vast collection of wires, footpedals and microphones – a lot of tech which we saw was put to very good use later on.
After our usual floor singers, our guests made their appearance in good time to begin their first set with co-written songs, many of which are on their 2020 and 2026 albums. Their subject matter is interesting and varied, around themes of concern for climate change, the future of the planet, the natural world and the survival of our own species. They also sang more introspective songs which I think we can all relate to, including ‘overcoming struggles, coping with grief and the after affects of shattered dreams’.
Honey and the Bear have a confident and very engaging stage presence, working together extremely well, never seeming to falter in their powerful nuanced voices, beautiful harmonies and skilled musicianship. Many of the songs that evening are recorded on two albums, Journey through Roke produced during lockdown in 2020, the newest one, A Wish and a Tide just released this year.
The first song of the evening was indeed from the lockdown album. They wrote and recorded it to keep them going during ‘a very dark, scary and uncertain time in all our lives’. The Swallow was the story of the swallows nesting in their neighbour’s garden with Lucy on double bass and Jon on guitar. It’s a very sweet up-tempo song with a chorus that is possibly the sound that the swallows make.
This was followed by The Sailor’s Daughter, then a song from their new album called The Air that we Breathe, another lively, well-written song celebrating their involvement in the planting of oak trees along their Suffolk lanes for future generations. Apparently the oaks will provide support for many creatures. Incidentally, the following day I came across a relevant quote posted by Bridget Cameron, ‘Imagine if trees gave off WiFi signals. We would be planting so many trees, and we’d probably save the planet too. Too bad they only produce the oxygen we breathe!’
Close to the Edge is based on the Suffolk legend of the merman, who looks up through the water with curiosity about the world, a quirky, interesting song. The final song of the first set, Tin, Tin was about the invention of the first hovercraft, a prototype made out of coffee tins and cat food tins, by Christopher Cockerell.
The Cruel Mistress from the second set, tells the sad story of the sea’s erosion of the Suffolk coast, which has forced many long-term residents’ homes to be dismantled before they fall into the sea: a rhythmic, haunting song. Later they sang a spooky song called She Waits in Vain about a woman ghost waiting on the shore for her lover to return from Dunwich, a town which fell into the sea in the thirteenth century. This was followed by Freddie Cooper inspired by the 1996 rescue of the Red House lugger by the Aldeburgh lifeboat crew. All on board were saved.
The final two songs of the evening, the only ones not written by Lucy and Jon, were Who Knows Where the Time Goes? by Sandy Denny and Caledonia by Dougie McLean.

For those of you who didn’t get to see Honey and the Bear, I would unhesitatingly recommend them. They were wonderful.

Our next guest is Virginia Kettle (with John Kettle) on 7th October

Maureen McGuinness on behalf of Carrington Triangle folk club.

29 July Jennifer Bell Trio

Feature night with the Jennifer Bell Trio

Our guests for a feature night on 29th July were The Jennifer Bell Trio, with songwriter Jenny on vocals and 12-string guitar (occasionally exchanged for a lute), Wilson Walker on fiddle, and Daniel Kittmer on bodhrán and backing vocals.

The first song of the evening, Ho! Sailors, is also the opening track of the trio’s recently-released mini-album Old Bones and Silver Fishes. Recounting the many ways in which a sailor can drown, it got us off to a cheerily grim start, ‘swimming with the fishes where the sun has never shone, rattling in the deeps with the bones’. From the same album we heard the merrily unsettling Silver Fishes in which rising seas mean farmers become fishermen (‘and we’ll all be dead in the morning!’), and Little Nut Tree in which the King of Spain’s daughter, having stolen the tree, unwittingly feeds herself to it (‘a meal of blood and bone’). The macabre is one of Jenny’s lyrical specialisms, disarmingly offset by the almost Elizabethan sweetness of her vocal delivery.
Wil’s sensitive bowing turned gently pizzicato on the poetic Song of the Strand (the no-man’s land ‘where it all began, neither sea nor shore’), while Dan’s harmony vocals were particularly effective on Colours of Harmony (a song of love for the lute and the lutenist, though the lute itself took exception to the 30-odd-degree heat in our upstairs room this evening and understandably declined to be tuned). The hooves of the horses which come flying out of the mist in Newmarket Anthem were beautifully evoked by bodhrán rumbles and fiddle flourishes.
A great range of characters and narrators is to be found among these songs. And so to Bedlam offers an inmate’s view of the crazyhouse (‘My mind is clear, just coloured up with too much life’), Foxtrot is a jolly singalong number observing a hapless fox in his efforts to, ahem, dance with three little wise hares, and a song which may be called Fish Food (my notes fail me at this point) gives colourful voice to a particularly angry mermaid (‘You dirty pink longpigs! You’re just fish food! You’re thick as plankton!’), with whom it was hard to disagree. Stirring original songwriting set to tunes in which echoes and snippets of trad and early music are never far away.
Paul Carbuncle

Our next guests are Honey and the Bear on 16 October, with the postponed visit by Virginia Kettle on 7 October

20 May: Winter Wilson

Winter Wilson

This is probably the fifth time Kip and Dave have been guests at the Club since I booked them after seeing them at the first Gate to Southwell Folk Festival. They started with the title song from their first duo CD “I hear Voices Sing” from 2003 which was pitched for sales at a fiver, but went on to a more recent lament of a mother for the son she had to give up for adoption Is It True His Eyes Are Like Mine?. The Freo Doctor then showed Dave’s song-writing flows as well in Perth, W. Australia as in Sleaford, before Kip showed that she writes and sings from personal experience in The Angry Mother. The only songs they sang that they’d not written were Judy Small’s anti- war song Mothers, Daughters, Wives and Joni Mitchell’s song A Case of You that she wrote in Saskatoon, a prairie city they visited on their second Canadian tour, which has a statue of Joni.
Kip picked up her accordion to add to Anyone’s High Street an attack on the state of the nation in the last weeks of the Tories, and Dave’s other political song Hitch Up the Wrecking Ball was even more hard-hitting. Kip’s powerful blues singing has always featured in a set and we had a fine example in Old Habits although Dave couldn’t say if his riff was derived from Big Bill Broonzy or Robert Johnson. They ended each set on a high note, following Old Habits with the title track Home, which showed us that the place we call home is where our heart is.

Their second set built to a climax with Kip’s powerful rendition of Metagama, the ship taking young emigrants from Stornaway to Canada, then Storm around Tumbledown, which has led Dave to be recognised as a great song-writer, both of which had us joining the chorus with enthusiasm.
How do you top that for the encore? They had a great joiner-in with What Would Johnny Cash Do Now? and we all went home happy from a great night.

Singers who contributed earlier included Nick, Hugh, Phil Hind, Blossom (pictured above), Sarah and Paul.
Martin Smalley

April 15: Alden Patterson

Christina Alden and Alex Patterson

In their third very welcome visit to the Carrington Triangle, Christina and Alex again brought their unique blend of contemporary and traditional music to a very appreciative audience. In a small club like ours without a PA their intimate and engaging delivery comes across beautifully. Christina sings in a lovely pellucid, plangent voice and Alex closely harmonises in intertwining countertenor – although they sing English music they told me that they have been influenced by Americana style harmony singing. Christina, usually plays fingerpicking guitar in her inimitable eight to the bar strumming technique while Alex adds gentle melodic texture on the fiddle. This was how they began the first set, soon settling in to one of their most famous songs The Mountain Hare. Many of their songs are inspired by animals or nature and this was a feature of their performance tonight.
I really enjoyed their interpretation of traditional songs — for instance, Christina played clawhammer banjo and Alex his 1950s Martin tenor guitar for My Flower, My Companion and Me and Sing John Ball, both given a distinctive Appalachian flavour. They followed this with Hunter, about a magical bond between a brown bear and a grey wolf, and then the beautiful A Hundred Years Ago which celebrates the birth of their daughter Etta. When they sing together, Christina and Alex often look at each other and it seems to the audience as if we are being included in intimate, emotional moments. This is one of the unique aspects of their performance.
High spots in the second set included The Greenland Shark about ‘the oldest living vertebrate on earth’ that lives up to 500 years! ‘ 500 years I swam these seas, calling, calling for you.’ Safe Travels, the title track of their new album, and Our House both celebrate the importance of human community in our lives and were a fitting finale to the evening. For encore they did a rousing version of the shanty Blow Boys Blow with Alex playing spirited bluegrass style fiddle – great stuff!
Mike Wareham

Jon Marsden, another of our great collection of floor singers

18 March 2026: Bob Fox

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

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

Wednesday 10th December

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.