This is, I think, the first time I have written a post for this blog sitting in BLUES NIGHT when it is actually open. All that build-up, over weeks and months, and then I open for very nearly five years (apart from the times when the wise heads in Downing Street were saying that such things were simply not on) with very little to say about it. No wonder some people still don't seem to know What It Is.
So, just to recap - BLUES NIGHT isn't actually a 'Blues Night'. It's a shed in an attractive Georgian market town in North Yorkshire, where my records are for sale. I have been making beer in the kitchen since August 2018, and I'm starting to get quite good at it. You can come and try some if you like, but you don't have to. Also, you don't have to 'Like The Blues' to come here.
M told me six years ago not to call it BLUES NIGHT, because it would put a lot of people off coming. I knew at the time that she was right as usual, and (as is very often the case) that made me even more determined to prove her right by ignoring her advice completely. This was BLUES NIGHT’s anti-capitalist none-of-your-business model in embryonic form.
Elsewhere, in far-too-kind articles (that I won’t even link to here, because if you haven’t read them already you’re clearly not very interested) I have spent a lot of time yabbing about how all good music comes from the blues and therefore all good music is the blues yada yada yada, but I have rarely spoken about the time a frustrated blues enthusiast got annoyed with me for saying I wouldn’t just be playing Blues all night (back when BLUES NIGHT was a Blues Night a thousand years ago in South London) because that would be boring. There it is now, though. Hope you liked it.
Sadly, there can never actually be a good live Blues Night ever again, because all of the good blues singers are dead, and probably have beers named after them. The way the music industry has fucked musicians (apart from Adele and Ed Sheeran) over all of this century has led to us over-valuing live music and we really should get back to spending lots of money on old records. These are all just opinions of course. This record is an excellent example of a Good Live Blues Night, but priced at nineteen pounds it is a hell of a lot cheaper than a ticket to go and see Joe Bonamassa. Probably.
The second side is all Lightnin' Hopkins and it is just as fabulous as you might expect, but as Russ Wilson said before England won the World Cup, he was "one of the last of the great blues singers" even then. The first side is part Mance Lipscomb and part Clifton Chenier, and if there's ever been an example to be heard of just how varied and diverse blues music can be, it's this record. Or maybe they're not even Playing The Blues at all. I don't really know. What I do know is that I have started a pattern of always mentioning the sleeve in these posts, so two things - this cover looks right in a row of three on Instagram alongside the promotion of some excellent events (including Live Blues!) as part of BLUES NIGHT's Quinquennial in a fortnight's time, and also it is worth nineteen quid just for Ralph Gleason calling Lightnin's drunken shite-talking 'pretentious' and Strachwitz clearly getting pretty annoyed about it.
Again, as with the other posts, I'm not actually arsed if you buy this or not. There are no copies on Discogs for sale in this country, and only one on eBay, and that's £65. And it's unlikely that you will like this record more than I do.
