I’M JUST back from a wonderful mini tour of the north (well, Yorkshire and Stockport) with my band Barnstormer 1649 and hand-picked supports Blyth Power and Indignation Meeting, celebrating Barnstormer’s 30th anniversary.
 
I have loved Blyth Power’s, lyrical, history-sodden songs for more than 40 years and waxed lyrical about them in these pages many times. They were absolutely brilliant on this tour and I was proud to join them on violin for a few songs, as I have done more or less from the start of our long musical friendship.
 
Recently I’ve become very fond of Indignation Meeting
 too. Ancient readers familiar with crap American ’70s pop TV programmes may understand the comparison if I say they’re the UK’s answer to the Partridge Family, only about a hundred million times more listenable.

Their David Cassidy is a 15-year-old punky singer/drummer/songwriter called Peter, an astonishing talent who somehow also manages to play the trumpet while keeping time on the kit. Dad Michael plays guitar, mum Sally and sister Heather provide backing vocals and Hugo, Joseph and Annie from Blyth Power’s teenage son, is on bass.
 
Indignation Meeting’s melodies are catchy and powerful, their live show hugely entertaining and nearly all Peter’s lyrics are about trains, train tracks and train numbers. Astonishingly, it works. Peter is the John Wesley of trainspotting, a youthful messianic genius whose passionate advocacy transforms what is surely the very definition of an utterly pointless waste of time into a quasi-religious quest for numerical Nirvana.  

Not bad for someone about to take his GCSEs. I reviewed their second album a couple of columns ago and its brilliance was why I asked them to join the tour.
 
What a tour it was. We started off at the Adelphi in Hull, one of the all-time great venues of the DIY scene, founded in October 1984 by Paul “Jacko” Jackson: I did my first of 20-plus gigs there early the following year and it was wonderful to see him again. Then to the Hallamshire Hotel in Sheffield, another old stomping ground of many years’ standing, and the lovely and relatively new Grayston Unity in Halifax.

After a day repairing friends and hosts Mark & Rachel’s pond in Ossett (rock’n’roll lifestyle or what?) it was on to Blossoms in Stockport last Saturday and we finished off at Wharf Chambers in Leeds last Sunday lunchtime with the best gig of the lot. A fine time was had by all.
 
And then we broke down on the journey back south and it took us nearly 24 hours to get home, which, as Sally from Indignation Meeting so poignantly and sensitively observed, made the tour even more memorable. Here’s to the next one.
 
Time for an album review: it’s The Awful Truth from my old muckers The Nightingales, still going incredibly strong with leader Robert Lloyd’s most accessible offering since his New Four Seasons project an aeon ago.

First track The New Emperor’s New Clothes is Jonathan Richman’s Roadrunner taken for a new spin, the hard-hitting Same Old Riff which follows has more than an echo of Sister Ray by the Velvets, The Gates of Heaven Ajar goes back to Pigs on Purpose days but with an extra coating of melody chocolate, and The Men Again continues the feeling that, unlike most Gales albums, this one will only take five or so plays to fully grasp rather than the customary 20. And so it proves.

The recent documentary King Rocker has certainly delivered a fresh cohort of fans for one of the most innovative, creative and unpredictable bands that has ever existed, and I think The Awful Truth is the Nightingales’ best album so far, which is saying a lot.
 
Coming up in the immediate future for me; the local debut of my Early Music Show at the Yellow Book Bar in Brighton as part of the brand new Once & Future Festival, a return to the brilliant Wolverhampton TUC May Day celebration and my first appearance at Folk on the Pier in Cromer. Stay safe.
 
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