Tag: travel

Bloke on the Water..

(..and fishes swimming by..)

Earlier this week, I visited the Cariad IV narrowboat to record a few Goldfinches songs for The Narrowboat Sessions. For those of you unfamiliar with these sessions, they are an initiative run by Mark Holdsworth and his crew, offering “the biggest platform for unsigned, original acoustic music videos in the UK”. Every year, the Cariad crew travel “thousands of miles of the British Canal system recording different artists every weekday of the summer”, raising money for Cancer Research along the way. It’s a very cool and unique project. I took part in a session with John Slattery in August 2022 when we drove up to Shropshire and I remember the silencer fell off my exhaust pipe on the way! We sounded like a tank as I pulled up to a quiet canal-side location to make our recording in the remote countryside.

This summer, Mark and his crew had intended to wend their way down to Bristol (where Goldfinches would’ve joined them) but ill health, followed by a major canal breach in Cheshire, put paid to any ideas of travelling very far from the source. It was not possible for Goldfinches to drive up to Merseyside so, rather than cancel altogether, I decided to attend the session at Ellesmere Port on my own as I needed to drop off one of my daughters in Manchester anyway.

Cariad IV ‘stranded’ at the National Waterways Museum

It was great to see Mark again and revisit his tales of depping on keyboards for the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band and Gentle Giant (among others) and to learn more about his maritime past. (Bristol readers will probably know that the Bonzo’s Viv Stanshall brought the iconic ‘Thekla’ ship – when it was called The Old Profanity Showboat – from Sunderland to Bristol’s floating harbour during the 1980s, so there is a kinship – though a big difference in scale – between Mark’s snug floating studio and Viv Stanshall’s vision of a cabaret theatre on the water.) Working on the crew with Mark on this occasion were Cerys and Eli, of the Manchester-based horror-rock duo Body Water, who’d just discovered their latest single had been played on Radio 1! (Gosh, the talent on this boat!)

The Snug, with Bob the fish

And then it was time for me to record my three songs: one brand new one and two from the Goldfinches album ‘Shanti Time’. I started with the new one, ‘Attenborough’, an homage to the broadcasting icon ‘Sir David’, played on my ukelele. This was a debut performance as Goldfinches haven’t had the opportunity to play it live yet and it was a challenge to remember all the words. However, I think I got away with it and the crew seemed to enjoy the performance! I then followed ‘Attenborough’ with ‘Queen of New York’ and ‘Shanti Time’, songs which I’m more familiar with, both performed on Mark’s lovely Washburn ‘Tahoe’ acoustic guitar.

To conclude, it was a shame Goldfinches never got to squeeze into the snug studio to record a set for the Narrowboat Sessions this year but I was happy to take one for the team! We hope to join Cariad IV next summer when the meandering musical journey will hopefully happen once more.

Bristol Boats (“baba ba ba ba”)

An early watercolour painting of the Avon Gorge by JMW Turner (note the absence of a bridge across the gorge).
Boat by Trygg

It’s not often you see a boat in the Avon Gorge these days but in early November we saw two, a narrowboat and a sailing boat! Boats are a rare sight here because of the extreme tidal range of the River Avon (the second biggest in the world, apparently) as it flows in and out from the Bristol Channel twice a day.

I remember how strong the current appeared when I launched my tiny Journey of Song boat on the receding high tide beneath Clifton suspension bridge, back in the summer of 2020, how “the good ship” got swept away as soon as it touched the water during the filming of the trailer for this website. (Speeding up the video made the great surge of water even more apparent.)

Also pictured above is a cardboard model boat from the Bristol Harbour Festival in July and a beautifully constructed full-size wooden boat that was on display in an artist house as part of the 2024 Windmill Hill art trail, in south Bristol this autumn. Undoubtedly, this was another unexpected boat sighting! The artist(s), listed as Trygg in the art trail brochure, exhibited the boat alongside a floor installation featuring ceramic pots made from River Avon mud. Trygg is a Norweigan word which means ‘safe harbour’ or ‘be safe’ which is an apt sentiment for this boat-y post.

The top image is another ‘local artist’ discovery. In April, during a visit to Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, I learned that the celebrated Romantic painter Turner visited Bristol in the 1790s and made this watercolour painting of the Avon Gorge (entitled ‘The Avon Gorge and Bristol Hotwell’) at the tender age of 16. The iconic Clifton Suspension Bridge is conspicuously absent from Turner’s painting as it would not be constructed for another 70 years, during a famously industrious era of Victorian engineering.
Does Turner’s ship in full sail remind you of my Journey of Song ship?