Forest Folk

The tour ended nearly 3 weeks ago and after a lot of catching up on other things, now is to time to catch up on what happened after the last post (the last blog post that is).

The morning after the final show with Oysterband and June Tabor, we were setting off in what we thought was plenty of time for the two and a half hour drive from Canterbury to North Boarhunt and the Forest Folk Club when we checked the route to discover that the M25 was closed in two places. Suffice to say that it took us two hours to just get out of Kent including driving down country roads with barely enough room for two normal cars to pass let alone SUV’s, vans and at one corner even a tractor with two large hay bales looming over the car. Once past the closures, the drive was straightforward and we got to look down on the lights of Portsmouth before it got dark. 

Forest Folk is a lovely folk club in a small hall, perfect for the music. They have had a lot of great acts over the years as listed in the photo. All credit to Charles and Janet. 

We were given the most spacious table of the whole tour to show all of Ray’s merchandise. It’s a wooden board over their snooker or pool table with overhead lighting. You can see the gatefold vinyl for his latest album Even For A Shadow, all three vinyl albums and the full set of five CD albums plus the EPs for The Beast and Falling Like Thunder. Do you have the full set?

Support was from the Gilkicker Weevils, a young duo from Gosport just starting out into the folk scene with some good songs. Keep a look out for them as they develop.

Ray began this set with Sunday Morning Coming Down, a song from and sung for Kris Kristofferson who had died a couple of weeks before. Ray had recorded this song before the tour began while he was staying in Oxford, where coincidently Kristofferson had studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Ray posted his recording on Facebook and within a couple of days it had over 2000 views. As I write this, it has had over 20,000 views, 710 likes, 76 comments and 34 shares.

Click on the picture to watch the video on FaceBook. Click here to watch it on YouTube.