Last night’s on-line “Radio Ballads” concert…

Jez’s long-awaited on-line concert of songs from the BBC Radio Ballads was a ninety-minute carousel through a selection from the FIFTY-PLUS contributions he made to the award-winning BBC series between 2006 and 2018. A mixture of the more well-known songs that have made it into his regular repertoire and other rare numbers that he admitted he was singing publicly for the first time, Jez laced the show with recollections of how the programmes were made and of the people involved, and really gave us an idea as to the excitement surrounding these shows as each song developed from his own home-demo recordings to the actual broadcast programmes. Judging by the Facebook comments during the show, one song in particular seems to have made a big impression – the never-released SCHOLARS IN WINTER, which Jez admitted he had recorded for almost every subsequent CD he’s made, but he’d never included it on any finished album, a baffling decision. A surprise inclusion was the final song, BARNARDO’S PARTY TIME, which wasn’t from the BBC Radio Ballads as such, but from the “Ballads of Child Migration” project, made by the same production team, but for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2015.
All in all it felt like a special glimpse into a unique radio experience, and it did not go unnoticed that Jez was to be heard noodling through the melody of Ewan MacColl’s “Shoals of Herring” (from the original Radio Ballads series) on his guitar as the concert opened. A nice touch.
SET LIST – TAKING ON MEN / BLACK TRADE / CAPS AND CARDS / SCHOLARS IN WINTER / THE WALTZER / GOOD DOG AND TRUE / THE MIAMI / THE JUDAS BUS / BALLAD OF JOHNNY AND DORANDO / JESSE OWENS SHOES / IN THE NICK OF TIME / VOICES IN THE NIGHT / BARNARDO’S PARTY TIME
Jez’s next on-line concert is scheduled for the last Sunday in March, and is likely to be an “all-requests” show, so please send us your suggestions for this via the form on the CONTACT page of this website, and we’ll pass them on to the man himself.