The BBC has announced that John Martyn has died – he was only 60.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7858458.stm

Like so many people “Solid Air” and “London Conversation” were two of the albums that got me interested in fingerstyle guitar in the first place. I’ve spend many hours trying to master “May You Never” and still haven’t managed it.

I saw him once in the early nineties and he was so off his head he couldn’t do any of the accoustic stuff and limped through a set of that rather lame pop jazzy stuff he did for so much of his career. A lot of the crowd thought it was delightfully authentic of him to be too out of it to play but me and my friends didn’t quite see it that way – the tickets had cost us the best part of a whole weeks giro which we could ill afford!

Anyhow I could always forgive him anything every time I heard “Bless the Weather”.

John Martyn – 1948–2009

Lots of people have expressed an interest in having a ceilidh but we’ve always been hampered by the lack of a suitable venue.

However I went to a Stop The War Coallition meeting yesterday in a place called Harmony Hall in Turo Road, just off the high street opposite the Mall and I think the downstairs hall is just what we need.

It’s not huge but I reckon it could handle 50 or so people for a barn dance, it has a stage and you can bring booze. I’ve made some initial enquiries to the hall and they seem very enthusiastic.

So who fancies it? And more to the point who is up for helping get it up and running?

The first of out new regular tune sessions last night was a great success.

Thanks to everybody who turned up.

Our first session

I will be doing my first show of the new year today at 2:00pm live on Resonance 104.4FM. I you can’t tune in on the radio, or are outside the London area you can listen live at www.resonancefm.com

I will be playing tracks from the first 2 volumes of “The Folk Songs of Britain” LPs originally released in 1961. As I will be using old vinyl I’ll have some CDs with me as a standby in case of problems so the theme may change!

Will post the playlist after the show

We’ll be putting a proper page on the website shortly (I meant to do it over Christmas but I’ve been laid low by the lurgy) but in the meantime here is an early version of our tunebook.

Click here for the tunebook (to download right-click and “Save Target As…” or similar)

This is a ‘first beta’ of these tunes; there may be obvious errors and faults in them; please let us know if you think we’ve got them wrong. More tunes will follow, too.