There’s no fool like an old fool, they say, so what happens when a bunch of oul’ coots (+ one middle aged son) gather together to make music? The next series of posts may enlighten you as to the question just posed and may also, perhaps, enrage or entertain. These songs were the result of a few sessions around a table laden with alcoholic beverages of various kinds. Plonked in the centre of the table is, now, an iPad with connected mic that has somehow survived the knocks and spillages that are part and parcel of the sessions. So here we are, up and ??running?? again…
Song 49: The Lonely Banna Strand– Back in the mid-seventies we sat around a fire in a bleak backyard in Werrington and sang this (and other) songs. I came across a reference to this song in an old diary and, having decided to get up and going again (even though two of us are over seventy and I’m closing on that big “O” at a rate of knots…and the baby of the group is over halfway to three-score and ten) we offer up a series of songs and tunes that we intend (at some time in the not-too-distant-future) to take into a proper studio and record a properly balanced set. I think the singer interprets this portion of the story of Sir Roger Casement with real feeling. When I lived in Cushendall, I would often take the family out to Moorlough Bay, which looks across the North Channel to Scotland, and walk the paths about the headland, thinking about the achievements of this great man. I taught, also, for nine years in the 180s at Ballymena Academy, the alma mater of Sir Roger. While I was there, they did not acknowledge him, in any meaningful way. I wonder if this is still the case?
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