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Folk Review

The third Folk Club concert for 1970 was held in the upstairs common room on 12 June and featured special guests Phil Garland from Christchurch and Declan Affley from Australia. To a certain extent, the music was overshadowed as the unfortunate news of the evening's anti-Tour demonstration filtered through and the demonstrators themselves arrived.

The evening got away to an uncorrupted start with well known traditional material performed strongly by Richard Doctors, Dave Brannigan and Bob Silbery. Richard Doctors also gave his characteristically high standard of individual performance.

A promising new group called Godot led by Martin Fisher and featuring guitar, cello and flute performed contemporary and traditional material. Their sound had potential dignity in chamber music style but was marred by lack of sureness and monotonous arrangements. A contrasting certainty showed in the experience of Max Winnie, Graeme Nesbitt and Colin Heath. They gave a polished performance in the American idiom, and as was expected, were particularly impressive in the blues they did—Corina and Drop Down Mama.

Phil Garland's bracket included contemporary as well as peculiarly New Zealand material. His particular thing is to eke out folk lore at the grass roots, and he is endeavouring to keep it up full time while his contacts are still alive. In this respect one of his best songs was a poem, A Country Road I Know, by Sandy McMillan—an old gentleman who lives in Central Otago. Phil set it to music.

One of the most interesting developments on the contemporary New Zealand folk scene recently has been Tamburlaine—an aggregation of talented individual musicians that achieve a surprising degree of musical 'togetherness'. Their line-up includes Steve Robinson and Denis Leong on guitars, with Simon Morris on electric bass and Penny Evison on flute. Tamburlaine claim to play music—nothing more, nothing Jess, and their claim is not unreasonable. Their problem does not seem to be performance, but what to perform. The Moody Blues number, Legend of a Mind, demonstrated their musical ability best, but their material is divergent and they do not seem very sure where they are progressing to. It is to be hoped they get their bag together soon.

Declan Affley has a large Australian reputation, recently enhanced by his part in the musical direction of the Ned Kelly film. He lived up to expectations, with a fine voice and an economical and effective guitar backing. Unfortunately the mood of the audience was somewhat restless by this time, and he recognised it by concluding the evening with We Shall Overcome, accompanied by appropriate gesture.

Some of the performers remained to entertain those participating in the sleep-in.