Hosted by Monica
 
Monica
Puff the magic Dragon and Teddy Bear Rap
Great audience participation- after a few false starts , Smiley Hat Lady came up trumps.
A lovely feel good pub sing song
 
Lance
A Space woman came travelling and Seagull stole my sausage
Fabulous own penned songs with both humour and poignancy
 
Manus
Blues are on the game and Everybody’s a band leader at  Murray’s bar
Wonderful playing. Lovely plucking style
 
Kat
Little Things and Only you
Beautiful soulful voice  with keyboard magic !
 
Chris Martin
Sanity and Take my Hand
Lovely to hear Chris's own songs 
 
Ali
Rest of your lives and Lost without you
Lovely songstress  - with fab keyboard playing from Kat
  
Frank
Armageddon Jane 
Frank did us proud with fantastic lyrics – naughty but nice. Audience happy to join in !  
Old Rosin the Bow - Contrasting folk song, much enjoyed
 
Lisa and Jason
Lisa, Jason, Laura and Martin
Heart of Saturday night - Wonderful duet with beautiful harmonies.
Where is Elvis now - Lisa's own song ( Everyone should write a song about Elvis!!) Warmly accompanied by Jason on electric guitar, Tambourine Queen Laura and Martin on Base. Everyone loved it …
 
Heather
Seasons - Wonderful song by Heather- beautiful lyrics reflecting the colours of the seasons
Autumn Leaves – Eva Cassidy. Heather sang so beautifully- a joy to hear

Emma 
Henry my son - Hilarious song in Yorkshire accent – perfect for the accompanying ukulele. 
The Red Neck Fundamentalist - An honest recitation of the peculiarities  in our political world !! Brilliant

Nelson
You got nothing on me and Jump into my love
Brilliant own penned songs. Boy does Nelson know how to sing the blues and rock !!!
 
Keith
Close your eyes and The Worst Thing. Beautiful sad yet uplifting songs written by Keith

Ella
Billie's Blues (Billie Holiday) and Standing in the doorway (Dylan)
Beautiful piano playing  - so lovely to hear Ella play`

Paul
Kittyhawkes and Sunflower. Really  beautiful songs written by Paul - the first about how we over come difficult situations – there is hope in the future. Second song is how the sunflower can combat toxic waste.
 
Helga
Wandering - What a fantastic experience to hear the base  flute played by Helga
And a joy to hear her sing Lily Marlene, in German, to finish off the evening
 
Martin
Huge thanks to Martin for accompanying the singers with his wonderful bass playing.
Much appreciated

 
I really enjoyed hosting this open Mike –
Such a lovely warm and welcoming atmosphere for both players and audience , who heard the lovely music and came  in to listen!
Many thanks to all those who set up the evening,  with smiles and comfy cushions.
Happy Live Music !!
Monica xxx

Didn’t It Rain Children!

Arrived bright and keen at half past six to find the ever-heroic Jason lugging stuff about in the setting up process. People started drifting in and eventually we had over twenty performers listed. A very good turn-out. Standing around compering, watching the board and the performers. you get many sightings of a stuffed animal in a glass case behind the ‘stage’. A Stretch-Limo of a mammal. Stoat? Polecat? Weasel? Pine Martin? Ferret? Boll-Weevil? How is a blues-soaked ex-townie to know? Can anyone enlighten me? 

Not only were performers arriving but an array of instruments with jam potential. Martin arrived with his Fender bass and amp and set up in key sideman position. My keyboard went next to him. A cajon arrived. Kat’s electric piano was soon added. Jason opened the lid of the Bell’s cronky old upright piano for the use of the fearless.

Martin played his Fender electric bass on many songs and really enhanced the overall sound. He has an excellent ear (“The left one”, he jovially quipped when I mentioned it). He never puts a finger wrong, even on songs he’s never heard before. Thank you, Martin. He joined me on my opener: Albert Collins’ Too Many Dirty Dishes, a song of excessive washing-up as evidence of infidelity.

Many of tonight’s artistes shamelessly eschewed the blues and Kat was no exception. Accompanied by Adam on an impressively-white acoustic-bodied guitar, she gave flawless voice to Seal’s Kiss from the Rose and the much-performed, but still touching, Over the Rainbow.

Manus is a jazzer at heart and ably-equipped for the blues and all its friends and relations. He started with Tired of Talking (by Robbin Ford and the Blue Line) and, for his second piece, gave us a song by Chicago bluesman Robert Cray, whose writing is rooted in the blues legacy, but moves far and wide into all sorts of chord sequences and feels. Manus did well, and added a nice guitar flourish at the end.

Chris Martin, performs no covers but rather performs selections from his own, over a hundred, self-written songs. Not content with this vast store to draw on, he wrote a blues today and performed it this evening: Electric Blues and Me. He followed up with Life Ain’t Been Easy, written in 1991.

Martin left his bass in the corner and picked up his guitar for two self-written songs. Not Far Away is a love song for his wife, which he still hasn’t played to her – he wrote it in 2016. Martin has a talent for writing catchy and singable choruses and the audience soon picked up on this one, even adding a few harmonies. Wish You Were Here is based on his daughter’s fantasies about having an elder sister (she doesn’t), with whom she could spend weekends in Brighton. The title’s been done before, but the content definitely ain’t.

Heather appeared, complete with hat, to sing a capella Janice Joplin’s iconic satire on consumerism Lord Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes-Benz. The irony is that Mercedes used the song in a post-ironic (or was it a double-ironic) advert a few decades after the blues heroine died. She followed up with a new blues No Reason Blues written today accompanied by her husband Chris Martin, who brought a guitar, and a similar hat to hers, to the stage (same shape, different colour). The blues was written when she woke up this morning.

Jason gave us John Henry, the legendary tale of the American railroad worker who died trying to shift more steel than a steam-drill, very much in the proposed spirit of the evening and then a song that actually has ‘Blues’ in the title: Jessie Fuller’s San Francisco Bay Blues. Remember Jessie Fuller, the one-man band, who sang, played guitar, harmonica, kazoo, and hi-hat and invented an amazing device called the Fotdella, which played a bass-like instrument with a foot pedal?

Frank called for Bass, Keys and Cajon to accompany his fuzzed-up electric guitar on Need Your Love So Bad. Many choruses and solos followed with Frank’s enthusiastic overdrive turned up to 11. I think we broke the record for dB on an acoustic evening.

Ali walked up for her first appearance at the Bells and, if I understood correctly, anywhere. More power to her. Singing in the Shallow by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, she was ably accompanied by Kat on electric piano. Her second song was Leonard Cohen’s Alleluia - a great opportunity for community singing, to which the audience responded enthusiastically. Kat then took the microphone herself for a Kate Bush number Running Up that Hill.

Julian was up next with Don Henly’s The Heart of the Matter with his guitar in dropped D tuning. He lamented that you cannot do a six string D chord without dropping the 6th to D. This bought a gasp of protest from somewhere (Terry Lees?). I agree, although you either have to go a long way up to the dusty end of the fretboard, or court arthritis by bending your thumb illegally over on to 2nd fret on the 6th. He next played the very well-known May You Never by John Martin, which got several people singing along.

TJ, undaunted by Frank Xerox’s previous heavy band version, did another take on Need Your Love So Bad on acoustic guitar with Martin on bass and Manus on guitar. Manus, as always, came up with some very tasteful licks.

John performed what he described as “blues adjacent material”. His first was Lungs, a complex take on cancer by the soulful and poetic Townes van Zadt, followed by Mark Knopfler’s Why Aye Man, about how Geordies had to find work in Germany during the Thatcher era.

Emma claimed to be writing The Never-Ending Blues but – boom! boom! – hadn’t finished it yet. One she had finished was a rewrite of the Rodgers and Hart classic Blue Moon as Two Moons. Apparently, we have another moon visiting for a while under The Earth’s gravitational influence. Emma declaimed her views on this topic, accompanying herself on the ukulele. She then called up Nancy, who gave her - by now famous to the tune of 6 million You-Tube hits - exposition of Lancashire clog dancing. Never say there is not variety at the Bells, nor an eclectic interpretation of what the blues is.  

Mike Osbourne started on a long instrumental intro to a blues in G, which turned out to be Worried Life Blues an 8-bar standard recorded by Big Maceo Merriweather in 1941 (thank you Wikipedia) and performed by everybody of note including John Lee Hooker, BB King, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, the Allman Brothers etc. etc.  He finished with another BB King classic The Thrill Has Gone.

Nelson (Rock)King told a tale of going up to Gary Moore and asking him if he was; he replied “I was when I woke up this morning.” Nelson launched into Moore’s Dance Away the Blues.

It was understood that at some stage we would have to go to one song per performer. And here human nature showed itself in generosity when Ella Moonbridge and Simon Watt (both of whom wish to remain anonymous) gave up their one song so that people whose music they admired could do two. Ella bowed out to Paul and Simon donated his spot to Terry Lees. Paul Played January on slide guitar, followed by a ragtime piece, both repaying Simon’s generosity. After Paula, specially dressed in blue as her contribution to the night’s theme had sung her self-penned Night Story, Terry finished off the evening.

Terry played a song he often sings – and for me he can’t sing it enough – Richard Thompson’s Vincent Black Lightning. Terry had another Gary Moore story. In Bonner’s music shop in Eastbourne, he was there when Gary, four days before he died, was trying out a Gibson 335. He turned to Terry and said: “Terry, does that sound all right?” What a tribute!  Terry played the last piece of the evening, an instrumental Scottish bagpipe tune Eilean Donen.    

Many, many thanks to Jason for all his work setting up and adjusting the PA, and to Frank for recording the performers - and to the Bells for promoting live music in its many forms.
11pm. I walked out into the aftermath of blues weather. My car was swimming in the six inches of water that covered half the car park. The A267 was ripe for skids and aquaplaning. I drove slowly. In the words of Sister Rosetta Tharpe: “Didn’t it rain children? – Rain, oh my Lord!”

Parish notices:
Terry Lees is at the Venton Centre, Eastbourne this Saturday (12th October) 10-12am with local blues legend Penny Payne (she’ll also be guesting there on my spot, on Saturday 2nd November).

Martin is running the Laughton Open Mic (at Laughton Parish Hall, Church Lane, Laughton) on alternate Friday evenings. £5 admission and bring your own drink. The next one is on 18th October.
​
(Totally unrelated to the blues) I run a poetry writers’ group High Weald Poets that meets one Wednesday morning a month, to read and discuss our new poems. Anyone interested?
 

Hosted by Nelson
Singers and musicians this evening were;
Nelson, Lance, Manus, Frank and Laura, Chris, Mike, Heather, Terry, Steph and Lionel, Ella, Terry and Steph, Emma, Simon, Derry and Liz.
​Thank you everyone.

Hosted by Lance

​Kat and Andy  Yesterday and All You Need Is Love

Trace played Kris Kristofferson’s Sunday Morning Coming Down and a song “Don’t Let The Old Man

Hat No Hat performed Spider and The Fly and Get Back

Tim Kent  did versions of With A Little Help From My Friends and Whiter Shade Of Pale

Lisa and Jason performed Ruby Tuesday and the You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away

Lance Sang Girl and then Don’t Let Me Down

Frank performed Paint It Black and Back In The Ussr

Helga and Kat gave a rendition of Let It Be

2nd time around for those who wanted to

Hat No Hat returned with Hard Days Night and then Twenty Flight Rock
Kat and Adam sang On My Own from Les Miserables and Black Horse and a Cherry Tree

Tim Kent  sang Nowhere Man and a Jeremy Taylor song Jobsworth

Jason and Lisa returned with Blackbird and Helplessly Hoping

Frank Closed the night with The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and a song Where You Gonna run to?

Hosted by Kat Black and Mr White

 
Thank you to Kat and Andy for hosting their second evening at the Six Bells.
 
A very busy evening that featured performances from Lance, Chris, Kat Farnet, Terry, Manus, Frank, Kat & Andy, Lisa & Jason, Monica, Martin, Heather, Andy, Emma, Ella, Simon, Trace, Terry & Becky.
 
Here’s to next time . . . 
Jason

Hosted by Monica

It was a great evening- such a wonderful collection of songs and songsters!
The mood was lively and companionable.
I loved that we had songs that were poignant, funny, clever and risqué! good to hear a mixture of covers and penned songs from our players.
 
Loved my first time hosting such a prestigious musical gathering, in such a  hospitable hostelry.
Enough for  now !
Much love
Monica 🎤🎧🎙️🎸🎹 🥰 xxx

1          Monica           HELLO,   I’d like to teach the world to sing
2          Lance             Wet patch song,   Don’t laugh at me
3          Simon             Who do you think you are shooting Mr Pootin,   Precious time
4          Kat                  Fix you,   Angel
5          Chris M          Ghosts,    Born Grumpy
6          Nelson           Blues,    Rocking rooftops
7          Jason and Lisa         The day that I found the Fafaria,  The river flows along
8          Heather          Brewers daughter,   Raindrops keep falling on my head
9          Frank              London’s calling,    A day in the life
10        Kat and Andy            Drive,   Hi Ho silver lining,   Come up and make me smile
11        Al              Meeerkat,  Mr Sweet,  Dodododiadoodiadoday
                                                                      [email protected]
 
Encores:        
​Al         Swing low
Kat       Dancing on my own
Chris M , Heather, Monica         Toast
Heather          I’ve got a brand new pair of rollerskates
Nelson, Frank, Kat, Monica               Goodbye

Hosted by Heather

​“Songs of War & Peace”
So we come to sing so many songs
And read poems that make the heart bleed
So we take comfort in laughter and light
And in the face of such tragedy this is our need
 
So we make peace in the face of such adversity
And the poems they still fell any sword
So we are human after all and simply carry on
And this is for you and whoever is your Lord . . .
 
Jason, Poet

The Mad Hatters of Chiddingly:
A Tale of Great Musicianship and a “Best Hat of the Night” Competition

The length of this blog title is matched by the length, depth, and breadth of music: 18 separate acts! That’s not counting the announcement of who won the “Mad Hatters of Chiddingly Prize 2024”. But I’m getting a-hat of myself here – all in good time.

Opening this intriguing night, Host Helga played a tuneful, classical flute piece (Eric Satie’s Gymnopedie Nr 1), in order to calm down the bubbling excitement over what the hell this hat thing was about. Those in the know had read the email, inviting musicians and audience alike to come wearing a hat. Others had no idea (yet!) how best to fit in, whereas real pros – like Terry Lees – just smiled and nipped out to the carpark: he always carries a spare hat in his car!

Rounding out the opening, Hosts Lisa (tut tut, no hat) and Helga were beautifully accompanied by Jason’s electric guitar in their interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love”.

Then Lance hit the floor, not just with one, but with two thumps. His self-penned “Chicken Song” - a radical expose of the barbarism entailed in eating chicken meat – and the brand new “Patches of Wet” - a hyper-realistic account of the sexual trials of a middle-aged couple – left the audience gasping. “I think I’ll go vegetarian and practice celibacy” one audience member summed up the impact of Lance’s songs. Maybe his non-street-cred cap shouting “Vote Trump” was meant to be ironic? But then, is a cap a hat?

On with the music. Kat on keyboard followed, with two beautiful love songs which she had composed, and was playing to an audience for the very first time. “On my Own” was particularly moving. She literally pulled her hat out of a brown paper bag, creatively decorated with coloured pencil markings and a pair of neon-green sunglasses. She deservedly, later, received the “Mad Hatters of Chiddingly Prize 2024 Runner-Up".

Songwriter Chris hoped to win the Mad Hatter Prize by pointing out that his colourful woolly hat had been knitted by Host Helga. His rendition of “Xeroxed” was masterful. Manus’s beautifully jazzy interpretations of well-known tunes came out best in “Trouble in Mind”. Kat Black and Mr White (wearing a hastily knotted-at-the-corners white serviette on his head) got everybody to their feet with a roaring rendition of the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant”, with much roaring of “I’m vacant” along with them. Very lively number!

Heather’s approach to showcasing her wide-brimmed hat, lined beautifully with fragrant roses from her garden, was to invite everybody in the audience to smell her headware. Interesting. Everybody liked her slow rendition of “Every Move You Make”. Nelson’s foot-tapping contributions were enhanced by his Wyatt Earp hat, which – however – was upstaged by Susan’s floppy cat-sitting-on-her-head, legs and tail attractively dangling around her face.

​Lisa and Jason were joined by Simon on washboard (!) and Tambourine Laura, with the sparkliest hat of them all. Lisa’s kazoo innovation strengthened the percussive impact of “San Franciso Bay”. The Steelyard Hobos did a great Americana job on “Why Worry” and “To Go to the Sea Once More”. The first of the night’s Three Terrys, Terry O’Brien, delighted the audience with “Bulldozer Blues”.

Frank goes to Chiddingly was ably supported by Tambourine Laura and Flautist Helga – making a great hat duo – in “Live & Local” and “Walk on By”. Neil’s heart-breaking rendition of Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” had everybody singing with him. He was then joined by Jim on Fiddle, and Simon. Simon then gave us a lovely interpretation of Tom Petty’s “Walls”. The second of the Three Terrys, hat pro Terry Lees delighted us all with Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice”, followed by a beautiful Celtic instrumental. “People Get Ready” rounded out the incredible line-up of the evening, performed by the last of the Three Terries, Terry Daly, and Becky.

So, who won the “Mad Hatters” prize? Adding drama to the nail-biting moment of announcing the winners, it turned out that the two frontrunners – Susan’s fluffy cat and Heather fragrant roses – were in a tie! But all’s well that ends well! Neither of them drinks alcohol, so they decided to donate the winner’s bottle of wine to the next raffle to support the Folk and Blues Club. What a night!

Hosted by Ella
​This evening began slowly as performers and our small audience gradually arrived. Some regulars were not with us for various reasons, but I eventually opened the evening playing Norah Jones’s ‘Shoot the Moon’ incredibly badly on keyboard. (What became of all those hours of practice I ask myself!?!) What a lovely forgiving group of people the Six Bells Folk and Blues Club are…….but at least I managed to perform my second song with far greater dignity. It is a song that I wanted to sing for Chris Mansell, who founded Six Bells F&B way back in the 1990s. He passed away last September. Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Angel’ (In the Arms of the Angel) is such a beautiful song.

Simon followed me with two very different songs, assisted by Lisa on washboard. Turns out that Lisa has an absolute gift for playing washboard, having never handled the instrument before. The first was about ‘Precious time slipping away’, obviously a serious washboard piece. Having recognised the value of Lisa’s accompaniment, Simon decided to give us ‘Too Much Snow (if you get my drift)’ giving further scope for percussive interpretation. We loved it. Hooray!

Chris, the drummer and a newcomer persuaded Manus to accompany him with a couple of blues songs: ‘Got my mojo working’ and ‘Bo Diddly’. With no practice, Manus was doing a stalwart job and Heather also joined in with some chords on piano filling out the backing.

Manus remained at the mic to perform Jackson C Crank’s ‘Blues Run the Game’ from the 1965 album of the same name, with his usual very skilful guitar interpretation. His next song ‘Murray’s Bar’ was self-penned and reminisced over his early musical years.

Chris (CJM) announced that he was due to become a pensioner the following day and sang ‘It’s only Time’, a retrospective, melancholy song about the past. ‘Leaf’ followed with the contemplation of a leaf caught in a spider’s web. Becoming a pensioner is obviously a major turning point, but with all endings come beginnings.

Our resident duo Lisa and Jason, performed ‘Tale of the Tapestry’. They always interweave both voice and guitar so beautifully. Going back in time, they then performed Jason’s dad’s song ‘The Glory of Love’, which despite the weather and the somehow discombobulated feel of the evening, (or maybe that was just me?) captured some real Mid-summer spirit, I felt. Lovely stuff.

Heather sang her song ‘Body Bound’ which voiced her concerns about physical limitations that come with the passing years, but that her spirit is free to fly. Woohoo. Setting an AA Milne poem/story she continued with ‘The King’s Breakfast’ adding music….. the king ‘likes a little butter on my bread’.

A Native American proverb was Brenda’s starting point, and a very valid one it remains: ‘When the last tree is cut, the last fish caught, when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realise, too late, that you can’t eat money’. She followed this with a poem about ‘the Little things in Life that mean a lot’, encouraging gratitude. She completed her performance acapella with the gospel song ‘Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)’ an African-American spiritual first printed in 1899.

Mike followed with some blues on guitar ‘Worried Life Blues’… Lord , lord, it hurts so much for us to part… a blues standard originally recorded by Big Maceo Merriweather in 1941. He rounded off his spot with American soul singer Sam Cooke’s ‘Bring it on Home to Me’, released in 1962.

Nelson noted that the tone of the evening was reflective. His performance, with lots of reverb on the guitar, was more upbeat: everybody wants, everybody dreams, ‘To be Elvis’. From his latest album he then sang us ‘Waterfalls’.

Emma was telling us that she has been complaining about the weather most of her life and compiled a collection of poems called ‘A year in Scotland’ reminding us that the weather has been quite bad enough here but that it was worse in Scotland. Her song was about cats: ‘I’m Minded to Murder your Moggy’ which ended on a postscript to remember to look down your cat-flap. She always makes us laugh.

The room became even more sparsely peopled, but there was a third song from most of those who remained.

​Manus sang ‘For You, There’ll be No More Crying’, .. For you, there’ll be no more crying, For you the sun will be shining…’, a Fleetwood Mac song.

Chris sang ‘The Last Song’ : ‘.. should be a sad song but not for you and me.’

Lisa and Jason were facing up to yesterday with some lovely harmonies and guitar work in their beautiful song ‘ Song of Silhuoette’.

Heather’s final song had us in a cowboy saloon sitting on bar-stools, but the song that had the potential of a ‘sing-a-long’ was falling on a rather empty room by this time.

Nelson completed the evening with a song whose title I cannot decipher from my handwriting, taking us out on a strong note. Apologies Nelson.

Despite it being a rather ‘odd’ evening and a bit thin on numbers, we nonetheless had the pleasure of a lot of very good musicianship, singing and speaking with abundant good humour and affability. The Six Bells F&B is a treasure and we owe our thanks to Jason for his continuing promotion of the club, setting up, taking down …. And also to CJM and Manus for stepping in to operate the sound desk when Jason was out front performing.

​Thank you everyone. See you soon, Ella