Hove Folk Club

Maggie Holland: Friday 5th September 2008.
Opening Night report by Robb Johnson.

It had been chucking it down for most of the day. Great big buckets of fat wet rain. Navigating her way down from Edinburgh, Maggie Holland managed acquire a puncture that required a visit to Portslade to get a new wheel put on. Maggie recalled spending summers in Portslade with her sister, who ran the high street pet shop.

The upstairs room at the Eclipse was almost constipated with heavy darkwood tables, chairs and stools. We shunted these around, lit some nightlights, put some old plastic take-away containers filled with gathia on the tables, along with a photocopied sheet of miscellaneous musical quotations for people to amuse themselves with before the evening started.

And then people started arriving. At first drifting in in ones and twos, but by about 9 o'clock people seemed to be arriving in full force, like the rain.

In the absence of floor singers, Robb Johnson played a couple of short sets that also included songs collected from the singing of Joe Strummer and Bob Dylan. Robb, in introducing Maggie, related how when he first ran a folk club as a student 97 years ago, Maggie was part of the first act he booked, Hot Vultures, and that, whilst attempting to avoid work for as long as possible by running folk clubs in a various establishments of further education, he had continued to book Hot Vultures as the first act, as this always seemed to be an auspicious way to begin such an enterprise.

Maggie Holland was, as always, magnificent, and delivered a superb set accompanied by guitar & banjo, as well as an unaccompanied version of a Butch Hancock song. Other highlights were "Black Crow", which only seems to gain more power each time she plays it; Dylan's "Mississippi"; a song - in French - by current French rising star Camille, learnt by Maggie as a consequence of insomniac exposure to very late-night radio programmes; and culminating in a splendidly jaunty version of "A Place Called England". Maggie duetted with Robb on "Overnight", which went surprisingly well considering they decided it's probably at least two years since they last sang it together, and encored with a ferocious version of "Salt of the Earth".

Tonight, Harvey's South Downs Harvest had made a welcome appearance at the bar, which made the evening even more of a contrast with the shite foul weather that still sulked in the streets outside.

Particular thanks are also due to The Doorkeepers, The Rafflers, the Leaflet Monkeys and the Websitistes.

Web site: www.maggieholland.co.uk
MySpace: www.myspace.com/maggieholland

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