Tomorrow shall be my dancing day

[venta]

It's Friday! It's, er, not quite three o'clock! But I'm on holiday so let's throw caution to the winds and declare... It's time to Boogie At Your Desk!

Friday afternoons need a little something. I think they need a Top Tune. Something to make you shuffle in your seat and, if possible, Boogie At Your Desk. I'll be endeavouring to fill this gap on Fridays this year.

I'm not claiming that any track provided to enable At-Desk Boogying is one of the world's best or most profound pieces of music. It will, however, be a tune which makes me smile, and which has at some stage made me surreptitiously Boogie At My Desk.

Desks are not compulsory, of course. Feel free to boogie through your office, in your bedroom, round your lab, across your classroom, on the train - wherever you find yourself on a Friday afternoon.

If you like the track, go out and buy the album it belongs to - I'll try and recommend a suitable CD to purchase for any BAYD track.

This link will expire at some point in the future.

Today you were invited to Boogie At Your Desk to:

Witches of Elswick - Honey For The Bee

(If you don't want to download a file with an mp3 suffix, click here to get a zipped verison.)

Well, I'm at a folk festival this week (in Whitby, North Yorkshire) so I don't see why you lot should get away with not listening to folk music.

I first heard the Witches of Elswick two years ago at Whitby Festival. They were people I vaguely knew of, as three out of the four of them are involved as dancers or musicians in the rapper world.

I commented then that they possessed the amazing ability to go from pissing about to singing in stunning four-part harmony without so much as blinking. I'd be impressed if I weren't so busy being jealous of said ability. At Warwick festival one year I had an extremely melodious shower, simply because the other cubicles happened to have two of the Witches in at the time, and they felt like singing.

I was interested to note that addedentry commented after a trip to the Cambridge folk festival that it was nigh impossible to find a "traditional" folk act (or something along those lines, apologies to him if I'm misquoting/misremembering). Every artist is billed as boundary breaking, genre defying or some other form of hitherto unseen crossover combo.

Come to Whitby. Here we have traditional music in spades, and sometimes it doesn't even have to involve fingers-in-ears. And I promise you that not one of the Witches has a beard. Or anything particularly noticeable in the way of woolly jumpers.

They do, however, have an album (called Out Of Bed) which is full of unaccompanied traditional songs, with really fantastic harmonies. They've just released a second album, which hopefully judicious hints to the uncle will have secured for my birthday.

Even better, if they're coming to a folk club near you, get thee hence and see them live. They really are great. If nothing else, it's lovely to see people who appear to be having so much damn fun singing.

(Incidentally, if you're curious, it's pronounced "Elzick", and it's an area of Newcastle.)

Comments

[erming.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, well you want to get yourself over to Germany. I've heard good reports of the Medieval markets.

Check out bands like Faun, who are quite traditional and though in German are relatively similar to the Medieval Babes.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, well you want to get yourself over to Germany. I've heard good reports of the Medieval markets.

Er.. I do ? You may well be right, but I'm confused as to why you're recommending them off the back of this post ?

[erming.livejournal.com]

Er.. I do ? You may well be right, but I'm confused as to why you're recommending them off the back of this post ?

Well they have a lot of medieval and folk music from what I've heard. Faun have some old style melodies (admittedly in German) and has music by Hurdy Gurdy.

Basically just me thinking you'd like the kinds of music.