Category: Albums

‘Keepsake Mill’ on radio

‘Keepsake Mill’ from the new ‘Farewell Reunion’ album by myself, Dave Higgen and Nancy Higgen (masquerading as the New Prize Silver Jug Band) is scheduled to go into the ‘Here We Are’ section of Stuart Green’s show  ‘The Folk Club’ (on various platforms as shown below) on and after the 5th of February.

The show broadcasts as follows:

Folk Friday Radio www.facebook.com/folkfridayradiostation/

Every Weds 6.30pm  (Repeat Sunday 2pm)

Folk Music Notebook The Folk Music Notebook – Home

Every Thurs 10pm ET / 7pm PT /  UK  Fri 3am & 11am UK

West Norfolk Radio 

Saturday 7pm UK Time [West Norfolk Radio]

Mixcloud

Every show is available to catch up on The Folk Club

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 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)*

Yet another album: Brookland Voices

I know it’s hardly five minutes since the last album, but I’ve actually been working on this one since last year.

Brookland Voices album cover

Brookland Voices started as another vaguely folky album, but somehow Messrs Yeats (subsequently moved to the ‘Swan Songs’ album) and Housman elbowed their way in. Then I found myself with all these improvised or semi-improvised guitar pieces, some of them played on electric rather than acoustic guitar, and they do seem to dominate the album. In fact, while I would never claim to be any sort of jazz guitarist, this is probably as near to a jazz album as I’ll ever get. To be fair, ‘South Wind’ and ‘The Water is Wide’ are instrumental versions of traditional songs/tunes.

‘Severn Years In The Sand’ is a version of a song that seems to have arisen during World War II among units that saw service in the Middle East. ‘The Knocker Up’ and ‘It Ain’t Gonna Rain are actual folk songs. ‘When I Was In Love With You’, ‘Far In A Western Brookland’, ‘When I Was One-And-Twenty’ and ‘Blue Remembered Hills’ are settings of verse by Housman. The song ‘A Rainy Day Blues’ and the other instrumentals are my own, including ‘Chivalry’, which is an instrumental based on my own ‘Song of Chivalry’.