Category: musical friends

New Album – ‘Farewell Reunion’

By David Harley, Dave Higgen, and Nancy Higgen, masquerading as the New Prize Silver Jug Band.

There’s a certain amount of genre hopping here, but no actual jug band music.  Come to that, no brass/silver band either. Next time, maybe.

Back at the end of the 60s at college in North Wales, Dave and I, among others (including Sally Goddard, better known more recently as part of the Canadian band ‘Atlantic Union’, and Paul Dunderdale, last heard of teaching music on the Isle of Man) occasionally gigged under a name that cheekily parodied that of  a local silver band. When Dave and I started (via the wonders of internet connectivity) to record together, it seemed appropriate to resurrect the name (but dropping the name of the real silver band!)

Farewell Reunion (name taken from one of Dave’s songs) is currently available only from Bandcamp, though it may get streamed at some point. No hurry for that, since it’s unlikely that any of us will live long enough to make the threshold for payment from Spotify etc…

Dave Higgen: engineering and production; bass, drums/percussion, keys, guitars, vocals**, any instruments unaccounted for.

David Harley: octave mandola, most of the guitars and impersonation of other things with strings (but not the harp), vocals*.

Nancy Higgen: vocal on ‘Mad as the Mist and Snow’***

Here’s the tracklist. You don’t have to buy anything to listen to tracks.

  1. Anywhere (Harley)*
  2. Summer (Higgen-Harley)**
  3. Old White Lightning (Harley)*
  4. Bourgeois Domesticity (Higgen)**
  5. A Rainy Day Blues (Harley)*
  6. Mad as the Mist and Snow (W.B. Yeats-Higgen)***
  7. Who Do You Think You Are? (Harley)*
  8. Alone (Higgen)**
  9. Hannah (Upcountry) (Harley)*
  10. Ugly (Higgen)**
  11. Keepsake Mill (Robert Louis Stevenson-Harley)*
  12. Farewell Reunion (Higgen)**
  13. Paper City (Slight Return) (Harley-Higgen)*
  14. Lachaise (Higgen-Harley)*

Miriam Erasmus

When I was a hopeful young singer-songwriter living in the South East in the 1970s, I spent a lot of time in folk clubs in Berkshire, Hampshire and Surrey. (Especially the one I helped to run for a while, at South Hill Park in Bracknell. It seems there still is a Bracknell Folk club, though it’s now at Bagshot, apparently.)

There were some fine acts who often visited the Home Counties in those days – there still are, of course, but I’m not there to see them! – some of them sadly gone (Bill Caddick, Vin Garbutt), some still around but no longer touring.

One singer whose charm and grace I remember with much affection is Miriam Backhouse (now Miriam Erasmus), a frequent visitor to the area with a wide repertoire ranging from Baron of Brackley and The Recruited Collier to Jeremy Taylor’s Nasty Spider and a spine-tingling version of Steve Goodman’s Ballad of Penny Evans. Since she moved to South Africa, we’ve seen less of her in the UK, but she still visits quite regularly, and her next tour is scheduled for June to October 2024, with another promised for 2025. I’m crossing my fingers in the hope that someone will book her for a venue near enough for me to get to, this time, as I haven’t seen her in person since those days in Bracknell!

You can contact her for her freshly-minted 2024 press kit on her Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/MiriamBackhouseErasmus – and check out her YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@miriamerasmusbackhouseoffi230/featured

You could even check out her ‘Gypsy Without A Road’ CD at https://www.motherearthmusic.co.uk/project/miriam-backhouse/ – it’s rather good!

Mixed-Up Boogie [working title…]

Back in the Dark Ages, I used to spend a lot of time sitting in the Refectory Lounge at what was then called the University College of North Wales, Bangor. No doubt I should have been in the library, but was likelier to be mistreating a guitar, often in the company of other guitar addicts, including David Higgen, who was better known in those days as Mex. (It must have been a student thing that no one called David should be known by their real name, since I was mostly known at that time as Bert.)

I’ve lost touch with most of the people I knew then apart from Sally Goddard (with whom I used to sing, and who visits my part of Cornwall quite regularly). I’d lost touch with Mex, too, but when I mentioned his name in a blog article, he picked up on it and contacted me, which is nice. During one of our recent exchanges, I mentioned this thing that we used to do as a rather flippant guitar duet. He didn’t remember it, but started to nag me to include it here. I don’t remember exactly how it went (or even what we called it, if we called it anything at all, and I can’t remember Mex’s riff either), but it went something like this. I suppose I ought to have another go to correct a couple of bits of slightly suspect notes and timing (but as Broonzy said, there’s no such thing as a strict 12-bar; or something like that, though I suspect that he had in mind putting in an extra bar, rather than an extra beat). I guess I should put in a second guitar part in at some time, but in the meantime…

I’m not planning on putting it on an album, but never say never.

David Higgen has a lot of very interesting stuff on YouTube.

Sally Goddard has been singing for many years with the Canada-based folk band Atlantic Union, which has put out several classy CDs.

And here’s that boogie thing. Feel free to tell me to boogie off.

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