Street Voices

From Manchester to Grantchester, with a picnic and a song

Kay — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:18:12 +0000

On Friday 27th April we rambled in the rain and sang by the river to celebrate the 80th Anniversary of the Mass Trespass of Kinder Scout which took place in April 1932.

rambling in the rain

With our multicoloured umbrellas and various waterproofs and wheelie devices we made our way from Newnham to Grantchester Meadows, where we sang ‘The Manchester Rambler’ and our Mass Trespass song specially written for the occasion. The skies cleared long enough for us to get out the guitars and there was even a short burst of sunshine as the Mayoress arrived to join in the fun. Please check out all the lovely photos of the day in our ‘Other Photos’ album on this site!

Mayoress Margaret joins in the fun

As the black clouds rolled in once more we continued to our final destination, the very welcoming Grantchester Village Hall. Our wonderful volunteers – Jo, Inge, Kate and Pauline – had everything ready for us to enjoy our picnic and celebratory tea and cake.

'If I could make days last forever...'

Thanks everyone who made it such a day to remember. And hats off to the triumphant mass protesters of 1932. Their vision and bravery made it possible for us to enjoy the freedom to walk on our beautiful hills, moorland, common ground and heathland today.

Grantchester Meadows

Céad mile fáilte romhat! A hundred thousand welcomes to you!

Kay — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:22:38 +0000

Street Voices will once again be preparing for St Patricks Day with our annual Irish Session this Friday 16^th March.

We are looking forward to welcoming all our friends, old and new, for an airing of some favourites from our Irish repertoire.

We’ll also be enjoying the sounds of the wonderful celtic harp and WB Yeats poetry from Dodie Carter and Tom Sheerin.

We’ll start at 11.00 and finish at 1.30 and we’ll be at our usual venue of 82 Akeman Street, Cambridge.

Do come and join us, and if you can, wear something green and bring an Irish song or poem!

African Drums and an Indian chant with Daniela

Kay — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:13:01 +0000

On 9th March we once again welcomed Daniela McDermott for a fabulous session of African drumming. Is it my imagination or are we really improving each time? To my ears it sounded very good.

If you would like to contact Daniela about drumming workshops, do visit her website: www.drumworkshops.co.uk

The drums may have been African, but the chant we sang this time was Indian: ‘Jai Ganesha, O Jai Ganesha’ Moreover, my Google search this morning yielded a very appropriate drawing of Ganesh, complete with all the things we can all learn from him.

Happy New Year

Kay — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:53:38 +0000

Happy New Year to all our fans!

Please support us if you can by coming to the annual Homelessness Sunday concert of poetry and song at the Leper Chapel on Newmarket Road – arrive 3pm for a 3.15 start. Wrap up warm and do bear in mind that, in true medieval style, there are no toilets at the chapel. Full details are on our ‘Events’ page. The Concert is organised by Cambridge Link Up, a group run by and for homeless people. To find out more about Link Up, see www.cambridgelinkup.org.uk.

It may be January now, but listening to the birds singing today I can’t help feeling that Spring could be just around the corner.

Did someone say Spring?

So we are already looking forward to our annual Irish session and lunch on 16 March – and I’m sure there will be lots of other performances and events besides. Keep an eye on this website for more news and events. We hope to see you soon.

I’m gonna sit at the welcome table!

Kay — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:27:33 +0000

Well, it’s December already and 2011 is nearly resigned to the back catalogue of years… Street Voices have just three more events in this year’s diary! This week we have a Festive Jam Session at Willow Walk Hostel on the afternoon of Thursday 15th, and everyone’s favourite festive event, the Street Voices Fish and Chip lunch on Friday.

Festive Fish and Chips

We’ll be filling the community room at Akeman Street with members old and new, regular attenders and occasional visitors alike. After a harmonious and hearty starter of songs from our seasonal repertoire, we’ll sit down to share a delicious, nutritious fish and chip takeaway meal together.

It seems fitting that lately we’ve been singing an old Spiritual – and American Civil Rights song – ‘I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table’. We’ll be aiming to make ours a real ‘Welcome Table’ on Friday.

Christmas sparkles at Wintercomfort

The third and final event of the year will be on 23rd December, when we’ll be visiting Wintercomfort and entertaining service users and staff with a seasonal sing along…

After that, it will be out with the old and in with the new as we look forward to the annual Homelessness Sunday concert, at 3pm on Sunday 29 January. As usual, the venue will be the ancient (and chilly) Leper Chapel on Newmarket Road. We are really looking forward to airing our new repertoire to the wider public… So do wrap up warm and come down to listen… there’ll be plenty of our trademark folk and blues, with a few surprises.

If YOU have an idea for a Street Voices gig in 2012 please do get in touch and we’ll certainly come if we can. We especially like community events where we get to meet people and raise awareness of some of the issues surrounding homelessness.

In the meantime, everyone at Street Voices would like to wish our wonderful fans and followers a peaceful and blessed Christmas season.

Drumming Circle of the Honey Monster Love Child

Kay — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 13:30:48 +0000

Footsteps, heart beat, just breathing in and out… we’ve all got rhythm in our souls, and who better to coax those rhythms out into the open than our lovely drumming friend, Cambridge’s own drumming maestro, Daniela McDermott. On Friday 9^th September we formed our own drumming circle and took turns to keep a steady beat on Daniela’s big ‘sangban’ drum, while the rest of the group did their funky stuff, weaving rhythms in and out of some totally spontaneous musical creations. We were playing djembe drums, the smaller Turkish darabouka, cowbells and woven cylindrical shakers called ganza. A new addition were the laladehs, carved from right angled sticks with wooden discs threaded on one end, which made a nice crisp clicking sound when shaken.

picking up the beat

All of this turned out to be the best base layer ever for some crazy vocal improvisations! After a bit of progressively less tentative tribal calling and responding, we moved on little by little to the magnificent and probably-never-to-be-repeated ‘Honey Monster Love Child’ riff. Well, you probably had to be there!

'honey - monster - love child!'

A Spooky Night Out…

Kay — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:01:02 +0000

Our old friends from the Land Down Under – the magnificent ‘Spooky Men’s Chorale’ – were back in town a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to some FREE tickets generously donated by Talking in Tune we were able to hear the Spooky Men in full concert mode, singing such classics as ‘Don’t stand between a Man and his Tool’, Dancing Queen, and (Can’t get no) Satisfaction.

spooky trio in the garden at Akeman Street, 2009

It was all far too exciting to hold a camera steady on the night, so trusty blog readers will have to make do with some archive pics of Spooky Men on previous visits to Street Voices, when we cleverly lured them with chocolate croissants and manly mugs of coffee. Thanks guys, you were great! We hope you enjoy our CD and the rest of the tour goes swimmingly…. Welcome Breaks and all.

spooky picnic 2009

Rain Clouds and Hort the Tortoise

Kay — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 21:47:58 +0000

Our first performance with Terry Waite three years ago in Newmarket was an inspirational occasion which has quite rightly passed into Street Voices folk lore. Who could forget the warmth of this great man who happily sang along with us and expertly played a set of spoons borrowed from the kitchen of the St Etheldreda Church Hall?

This time our performance for Terry was much closer to home in the lovely garden of Westcott House in Cambridge. Once again the cause was the young people’s homeless charity, Newmarket Open Door.

Despite a favourable forecast, the weather turned overcast and showery on the evening of the performance

The garden party guests were forced to take cover, while we played on to those stoic enough to venture outside! Thanks to all the folks who listened, enjoyed and made encouraging comments! Spoon-playing was clearly off the agenda for Terry, but we did manage a short interchange, and a brief reminisce about our earlier meeting.

After the very excellent buffet meal only one question remained… where was the famous Westcott tortoise? The rainy weather clearly wasn’t conducive to our reptilian brethren turning up for the gig, but we didn’t lose all hope of a sighting.

The lengthy business of drying off the kit and packing away the last few leads and stands finished, a shout went up from down in the walled garden – and there she was, the venerable Hort: safely tucked into her shell and sheltering by the wall.

I don’t know what she thought of the music (she didn’t say) but here is photographic proof of her presence

Street Voices gain new fans and pay tribute to Shayna

Kay — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 16:43:36 +0000

So much to report! If you didn’t make it to our recent gigs, prepare to be thrilled!

We went down a storm at the Cambridge Folk Club on the evening of Friday 27 May. Open Mic rules dictated we could only play two songs – despite many enthusiastic shouts of ‘more!’ from the audience. So we hope to return and play a longer set sometime soon. Watch this space!

1^st June – a sunny first day of the month and we had a grand day out at the East Barnwell Community Centre, where local youngsters were making some ingenious instruments out of recycled materials.

Our job, to play some grooves and get them all ‘shake, rattle and roll’ ing. I think that’s a ‘phrasal verb’, Gene will no doubt confirm…

So back to the music, hopefully we didn’t disappoint, with our usual blend of blues, rock and folky numbers, plus a couple of surprise additions on a (you guessed it) recycling theme. We struggled valiantly on to the end of our recycling version of ‘Ten Green Bottles’ – despite losing count several times on the way. Nick’s heartfelt exhortation to respect and care for Mother Earth and recycle those bottles, bags and cans will no doubt stay with us all for a long time!

Finally, what a fantastic time we had at STRAWBERRY FAIR on Saturday. It’s an event we’ve long hoped to play for. Thanks to the organizers and particularly to Jay for inviting us and looking after us so well. The bandstand on the ‘Village Green’ looked fantastic with it’s multicoloured canopy and our own Street Voices banner resplendent on the side. So it was we kickstarted the fair at high noon with some cracking blues numbers.

A few songs in we played the reggae style ‘Hills Road Blues’ as a very special tribute to our friend Shayna, who has sadly passed away. Shayna came to our CD launch in November, and her dad says that of all the songs she loved that particular track. Shayna was very close to the heart of Nick and many of our fans and followers, and it was easy to imagine she was there with us in the warm and playful breeze.

Set lists are always somewhat fluid with this group, and luckily so! The early return of the parade half way through the quieter part of our set meant accommodating an interlude of rumbustuous samba beats with associated stilt walkers, belly dancers and assorted carnival characters. There was nothing for it but to pitch ourselves in to the musical tide and add our own fine and funky riffs to the melée.

It was to our usual jamming sessions as white water rafting is to a gentle paddle down the river! But, as they say, ‘nobody was drownded’ we went on to play our closing numbers, and our cheery crowd of fans loved it all, down to the last fading notes of ‘Leslisa’… ‘by the riverside’.

A bright, bright, sunshiny day…

Kay — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 18:06:27 +0000

Spring sunshine and birdsong greeted us as we piled out of the trusty Panther minibus into the green haven of Haslingfield village churchyard. Once inside, All Saints Church is cool, spacious and has a delicious acoustic – superb for our songs and sublime for the luscious and moving soundscapes of Toby Peters, whose subtly crafted guitar work carried Jade’s beautiful poetry beyond mere words into a spiritual dimension.

luscious soundscapes from Toby

Body and soul were refreshed in equal measure with sandwiches and cakes to die for in the break… Our lovely audience warmed to our songs in no time at all and I’m sure some would have been up and dancing were it not for the pews cramping their style somewhat.

Haslingfield Blues

All in all a brilliant experience of taking the Street Voices sound and message to new friends who gave us a wonderfully warm welcome. Thanks to the Friends of Haslingfield Church. It truly was a bright, bright sunshiny day….