Countdown To Christmas

I always know when Christmas is meant to start, And that's when folk singer Kate Rusby rolls into town with her festive concert, complete with a reindeer and a small brass band.

I must have seen Kate and her band a dozen or so times now, and never tire of her tunes, stories and humour.

She comes from Barnsley, in South Yorkshire, and is really down to earth. I don't think she could be a diva if she tried. No peeled grapes, or champaign for her. She's happy with a mug of Yorkshire tea and some biscuits.  For example, she said that she was cold on stage, so she came back on wearing a woolly fleece.

The packed Royal Centre audience enjoyed about two hours of music, including three versions of the carol "While Shepherds Watched", but all with different tunes. Apparently there are thirty, and Kate wondered whether the audience would be interested in listening to them all!

I had booked late, so all the really good seats had gone, as she is really popular. So mine was up in the 'gods'. So I took along my telecom lens, to see if I could capture a few moments. I managed to take a few shots, before the inevitable tap on the shoulder and the usual phrase "Sorry, no photography".

It was the last night of the tour, so she will be driving back to Barnsley to spend the festivities with her partner Damian O'Kane, who also plays in the band, her two daughters, and her eleven year old dog Daisy.

Next year marks her 25th year as a performer. So no doubt Ms Rusby will be back in Nottingham before long, and hopefully I will get a better seat next time.

Synthesis

The first time that I came across a synthesiser was at school in London in about 1975. It was during a music lesson, when our teacher switched on this strange looking black box with lots of flashing lights. He then played a simple tune and all sorts of weird noises came out. There was also a lot of plugs that he changed by unplugging them and putting them into other holes and some even stranger noises came out.

I was amazed about what it could do, and have been in love with such music ever since. The first musician that I got into was Jean Michel Jarre and his 1976 album Oxygene. Then came along Tangerine Dream, Mike Oldfield, Vangelis and Kraftwerk.

So I was excited to see this Moog Voyager synth at the studio in Mansfield yesterday. Sadly it wasn't used in the songs that were demoed by the Disco Prophets, although they do have a keyboard player in the band called Richard, who has a couple of keyboards himself, but neither of them are Moogs.