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