Lynn News review of Great Massingham Social Club/ West Norfolk Radio

Great Massingham calling… and introducing West Norfolk Radio

http://www.lynnnews.co.uk/what-s-on/lifestyle-leisure/review-massingham-folkspot-night-1-6429876

Lexie Green

 

Last Sunday night I saw three hours of live variety entertainment. THREE great bands; quality floorspots, recorded CDs and interviews; a big friendly bar and a happy end-of-weekend crowd to share it all with.

I felt very smug that as a reviewer I was getting all this for free. And then I found out everyone was!

I don’t know how Vic Cross, manager of Great Massingham Social Club, and Jane Knights of West Norfolk Radio (formerly Folkspot) can afford to mount this collaboration every Sunday night. But it’s definitely worth driving (or moving!) to Massingham for –if you’re not lucky enough to live there. Or at least tuning in.

 

Lexie Green and the Indigo Blue

Lexie Green and the Indigo Blue, a Marshall-amped, female-fronted country rock band from Cambridgeshire, served up a top set of self-written songs, some of which have won international awards. If Lucinda Williams’ guitar met John Paul Jones’ drum, this might be the love-child!

They had a great range. Lexie’s vocals swooped from tender to rocking and back again and her warmth and sense of fun lifted the audience.

 

Trio

 

Norfolk’s very own Trio sustained an attractive and ambitious set of classic harmony-rock. (Stealer’s Wheel, CSN &Y, Crowded House, ELO, Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Tracey Chapman…) Just when you thought Phil, Mark and Dawn’s voices couldn’t get any more exciting than their ‘Eleanor Rigby’, they hit us with a hopping 5 string bass-thumping tribute to Stevie Wonder’s ‘Hotter Than July’ that had my wife and me all but bopping around the bar.
 

Joe and Mary

Gospel-tinged Norwich country-folk duo Joe & Mary gave us a set of alternative intimate love-songs alone worth going out for. Fortunately, like Folkspot house-performers Mike Prior and Dave Cooper, they’ll be back.
 

West Norfolk Radio broadcasts every Sunday from 7-10 pm on www.westnorfolkradio.co.uk contact Jane Knights on 07780977301. Enquire about Great Massingham Social Club’s events and bookings on 01485 520387

Sedgeford Remembrance, Anthems for Doomed Youth and Private Peaceful Collins Resources

 

 

 

The Sedgeford War Memorial stands on a distinctive triangle of grass at the heart of the village: Cole Green. It was unveiled by the Countess of Leicester (of Holkham Hall) in 1920. Its lovingly tended clean modernist lines still gleam. With its telephone directory of names honouring local war dead, and its three trees standing sentinel, it has a special atmosphere all year round.

And every Remembrance Sunday it draws a village together. Whatever ‘country’ means to those gathered round the memorial today, their predecessors were prepared to die for it.

The ‘war to end all wars’, alas, did not - and wars and memorials continue. But 23 of the names read out - a figure out all proportion to the size of the village and Sedgeford is hardly alone in that – are from the First World War. It will always have that awful prominence. As the solemn and beautiful words of the service bear witness:

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

No, that’s not from the Bible or The Book of Common Prayer. It’s the fourth verse of ‘For The Fallen’ written in September 1914 by the poet Laurence Binyon.

‘The Times’ published the poem in remembrance of the British Expeditionary Force’s crucial rearguard action after the Battle of Mons in August 1914 and its last ditch resistance shoulder to shoulder with the French at the Battle of the Marne in September. Without such sacrifice, the war would surely have been lost within two months.

Adopted by the Royal British Legion to commemorate fallen servicemen and women they, like the fallen, do not grow old.

 

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen, d.1918

The General     ‘GOOD-MORNING; good-morning!’ the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,

And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.     .    .    .    .

But he did for them both with his plan of attack.     Siegfried Sassoon Poems as performed at a Great Massingham Social Club and streamed live on Folkspot radio Sunday 9 November (a fabulous show which included three excellent rock, harmony and folk bands on West Norfolk Radio)  MY FREEDOM TO TEACH COLLINS RESOURCES ON MICHAEL MORPURGO'S FIRST WORLD WAR NOVEL 'PRIVATE PEACEFUL' ARE   here Find them also on http://www.collins.co.uk/page/Book+of+the+Month for November

Lynn News review of Brooks Williams at Great Massingham, July 2014

You can read my Lynn News review here

The amazing pictures below were taken at the concert by the BBC's Iain Meikle.

Note the cigar box guitar.

To hear another recently unearthed, long forgotten and equally out of the blue interaction between Iain and I from 1992, please visit here