Guests in 2002

In January our guests should have been Ian Laws & Steve Mulhern, but unfortunately Steve was laid low by flu at the last minute, & Tam Lin stood in for them. You don't want a picture of them. We hope to see Ian & Steve sometime soon.

February's guest was Brian Peters; Brian plays and sings a mixture of contemporary and traditional music, & our audience thoroughly enjoyed the evening. Sorry, we forgot to take the camera again.

Our guests in March were Lammas, an up and coming band playing mostly Irish Traditional Music. Tim Dowd, playing  uilleann pipes, is the son of Tim Dowd Snr of Siansa, and is also an All-Ireland Champion, as are most of the other members of the band. With an average age of 18, they have a long time ahead of them to get EVEN BETTER. Not a few of us were positively suicidal by the end of the evening! If you get a chance to go & see them, don't miss it.

In April we welcomed Serious Kitchen, who we first saw at the Tartar Frigate in Broadstairs last year, when we were also playing there. All three members of the band are superb instrumentalists, with excellent vocals from Nick Hennessey, & we had a great evening. Unfortunately, yes we forgot the camera yet again, & they don't have any pictures either - if you want to know what they look like you'll have to come and see them next time they're guesting with us!

Asha, our guests in May, are a relatively new band, formed in 2000 and becoming well known in a variety of circles - they play for ceilidhs and have appeared at a number of festivals. You'll almost certainly have come across the individual members before - as Asha they are superb! 

Our special Open Floor night in May, in conjunction with Baldock Festival, was a great success, & we were inundated with floor spots; our apologies to those hopefuls who got a briefer spot than usual, and thank you all for coming. We hope to see you again!

At the beginning of June, it was our pleasure to welcome back Tania Opland & Mike Freeman, as lively and entertaining as ever, despite being, as usual, constantly on the go. The evening was over all too soon & we look forward to seeing them again before too long. 

Our second free Folk In The Park day was a great success, as those of you who joined us will have seen. We estimated that at times there were between 300 & 400 people listening. We were blessed with fine weather yet again, and some excellent acts, including Siansa, Mary Humphries & Anahata, & our star performers, Nancy Kerr & James Fagan - not to mention popular local artistes Robin Harper, Malcolm Hobbs, & Homebrew, to name just a few. Hope you're all looking forward to the next one?

Then Autumn was upon us once again, as well as the first open floor of the new season - which was attended not only by Paul Scourfield but also by Brian Heywood and Donna (Brian will be known to many of you as a member of a number of bands, including Moondance & EnQ) - we had our first guest evening, to which we welcomed Dave Swarbrick & Kevin Dempsey. Lots of you turned out to see Swarb & Kevin, & it was great to see him in such good form.