This year we were a little short of home-grown fans (old friend Paul gets a band T-shirt for seeing us two years on the run) due to all kinds of commitments and the fact that the band was asked to close the festival on the Monday night shortly before the horrors of the working day started for many the day afterwards. As a result, the audience were a little muted also, (as well as suffering from 4 days of non-stop Thwaites and meat pies, the northern equivalent of "super-size me"); not to mention da blooz - in how many ways can your baby leave you ? Well the audience had heard them all by this time. The human constitution can only stand so much. Nevertheless, the band, consummate professionals that they are, soldiered boldly on, waking up in the morning when so many had woken up the morning before.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Burnley National Blues Festival, go have a look yourself. It is still slightly spooky to walk through the streets of a northern industrial town to find the blues pounding out from every pub, all day, every day for 4 days, and a substantial part of the nights. In the Lord Nelson, Blind Hound-Dog Sigley belts out the Accrington Road pie and peas shop Walking blues accompanied by his dog Smearbottom; in the Belvedere, Stuttering Lemon Arkwright has been trying to finish a tune since 1994. Basically its wonderful, its been going for 19 years and its had some of the all-time blues greats playing there ................... and now, once again, to prove it was no fluke, us. This year we didn't have time for the annual pilgrimage to the Bacup Brittania Coconut Dancers, but its nothing personal guys, we will be back in the words of the eponymous Arnold.
Sadly we were at 80% strength because "Desperate" Don Stuart our legendary sax-man unfortunately was unable to join us again.
Malcolm (with son and son's girlfriend) and Les elected to go up a day early to catch some of the awesome main stage acts and for some reason no longer immediately apparent, to see Burnley v. Crystal Palace on Easter Monday. The main stage acts on the Sunday night were mostly fantastic. Malcolm, Ben and Beth took in the Cadillac Kings, an excellent band and Les discovered irony - a truly amazing boogie-woogie pianist, named, of course, Axel Zwingenburger. Axel regaled his rapt audience with jokes, boogie-woogie piano of the finest kind and a confession that he was a steam engine buff - all this flanked by two enormous posters advertising Thwaite's "Lancaster Bomber" beer. Such was Axel's energy that Les idly calculated that if it were turned into motive force, Axel and his Bechstein ("my other piano's a Steinway") could have clocked 80 on the M65 before being pulled over by the stalwarts of the Rossendale valley police. "Is this your piano sir ?". "German are we ?". Go and see this man, he is stunning.
| Boogie-woogie supremo Axel Zwingenberger going hammer and tongs at the piano. This performance made 8.1 on the Richter scale and the piano was visibly bouncing. | |
The next act was Big George Jackson, a towering practitioner of the blues harp slightly marred by his uneven grasp of time as he thanked the audience after only 30 minutes and would have been off had not his bass-player reminded him that he had another hour. This act sounded good but with no real verve and was easily overshadowed by the next and final act, Larry Garner who along with his band was simply awesome.
The day finished with the news that the blues boat, (a saunter down the canal accompanied by fine Irwell delta blues playing) had been cancelled causing some speculation that it had gone down with all bands.
A light Burnley breakfast of fried eggs, fried sausage, fried bacon, fried potatoes, fried bread, fried coffee, fried beans, fried jam and fried cereal preceded a major 2 hour yomp along the Liverpool Leeds canal which was so gorgeous that we forgot to take any photographs. A few ZZZZs and we were ready for the afternoon's er, well, er, entertainment - a battle of titanic proportions between Burnley and Crystal Palace. After only a few minutes, it appeared even to the Crystal Palace fans with whom we were ensconced that they had had a wasted journey, so they turned to a well-practised sarcasm. The match was simply awful and Malcolm was weeping with laughter at the comments of the fans behind whilst Les was entertaining himself watching the wind-farm on the distant horizon, (any fool can see it will need more of those big fans to cool down the earth with all this global warming). Meanwhile Colin, enroute from London, was at that very moment going backwards on his train into Newark after it broke down after hitting an old pram someone had kindly left on the line, whilst Jerry was in transit from a holiday in the Scottish Lowlands carrying wondrous beers which 12 hours later would take a fearsome toll of the faculties of the Juniper Hill Blues Band. The match closed at 0-0 of course following this wonderful quotation from the fans behind: "The bad news is that there's 5 minutes to go. The good news is that its not 10 minutes." - a triumph of the human spirit in adversity. Still it was a nice day and a bit of fresh air and the wind-farm was jolly interesting.
The band put together a 90 minute set for our slot at 9pm but disaster struck. The festival provides a drum kit, a PA system and a bass amplifier for bands to use. Sadly, the band before us managed to blow the bass amp up about 5 minutes before we were due to go on so Malcolm had to go through the PA system. Putting bass guitars through PA systems is really bad news for the sound mix on stage as the monitors then interfered with the guitar amplifier to the point where it was sometimes impossible to work out which key we were in leading to some exciting moments in the first few numbers. (For the mathematically inclined, monitors shove so much air with bass notes that the normal small-amplitude assumption of linear superposition breaks down if they are facing another amplifier shoving a lot of air and non-linear terms appear in the wave-equation causing different frequencies to appear a la Korteweg-de-Vries equation. In plain English, this meant that Albert King's "As the years go passing by" sounded as though it was in Gm when it was in fact in Am. That's your chronicler's excuse anyway. But a mere non-linear term can't stop a band when it hits its groove and we recovered from then on by turning the PA down a bit. Not many piccies available yet but a few follow.
| On your marks ...... Les sports a bigger guitar to cover up his awful shirt and ample midriff. A double bass would have been more suitable or perhaps a door. |  |
| Wailing ... |  |
| Team photograph before the long haul back and after a certain amount of late night drinking after the gig. Colin, Malcolm and Jerry demonstrating that they don't care that it will take 7 hours to get home via the glutinous M6, a mere bagatelle to seasoned bluesmen. |  |
So its back to the day jobs again, another festival over and already looking forward to the next one. Again, a big thank you to the organisers for a splendid festival and to our fans for showing up.
From the Juniper Hill Blues Band, http://www.juniperhillblues.co.uk/ to all our fans. Hi Mum.
23rd April, 2006.