Sweet Soul Sister

To be filed under ‘shameless nepotism’...

I’ve been busy and boringly quiet so I shall just go back to something nice that happened to the sister a while back. (I can still recognise nice! Hoorah!)

Anyway, as I think I’ve mentioned before, my sister is a professional classical cellist prone to playing in orchestras. However, early this year she was approached by a band to whom she had been recommended by a third party. This, I presume, is that networking thing in action- the networking thing I can’t get a handle on. Anyway this band, Inkubus Sukkubus, a a Goth Pagan rock outfit who are better known in Europe having played some of the big alternative festivals such as Germany's M’era Luna, wanted to try some acoustic reworking, hence the desire to augment with a cellist. The sister came on board and, after some delays due to the band getting caught up in the swine flu thing while on tour in Mexico, they finally did a very low key test concert, at Lammas, to see how the sound went down with an audience and whether it generally worked. Apparently, it went rather well... bigger things may follow!

There is a strange six degrees of separation footnote to this, an ouroboros if you will... back in (probably) 1989 the band, who started locally, advertised on the local radio’s sole hard rock/HM music show (Tim Oakes, I think) for a guitarist. Having been playing a whole 6 months or so, I rang them up to offer my not inconsiderable services only to be told politely but firmly that I was neither experienced nor aged enough... they were lucky... in the intervening 20 years I have got absolutely no better! That would have been back in the days when I bought Kerrang, before they went mad and started giving 5K reviews to absolutely anything! It's inccredibly strange to suddenly remember details like that from so long ago...

...and why am I telling you all this patently irrelevant nonsense now? Because some clips from that first acoustic concert have turned up on YouTube: all your typical camera phone footage with the expected sound mix... but just this once I won’t cast my malediction on those who clutter up gigs with camera phones!

Wytches

Come To Me

Gypsy Lament

Gypsy Lament (shorter but from a better angle)

...that’s all folks!