On line concerts this weekend…

Jez has two on-line shows this weekend – starting with the Friday Jan 29th concert for The Cutty Wren folk club, a local venue for Jez for many years, in the town of Redcar at the mouth of the River Tees, and now the location for the reclaimed anchor of The Bergen, a Finnish ship that sand in the nearby Tees Bay in 1898, and about which Jez wrote one of his most well-known songs. The story is that someone heard the song and that began the quest to find the wreck. The anchor is now on display on the sea-front. Whether that is true, we’re not sure but Jez will very likely sing the song at the show, and by the way, the first time he played at  The Cutty Wren was back in 1974, so there’s a lot of history there!… On Sunday January 31st, Jez is doing a live concert via his Facebook page, when as promised, he’ll be performing his entire 1994 album “Bede Weeps” solo. This is causing quite a bit of excitement on social media, and it’s free to watch if you’re a Facebook subscriber, with an optional donations feature as usual. It will be interesting to hear what Jez has to say about the album, which contains many of his most popular songs, not to mention hearing how much he’s changed the song-arrangements after all this time… Word is, by the way, that Jez’s next on-line concert, probably at the end of February, may well be focusing on his BBC Radio Ballads songs, many of which have never been released on CD. The demo-recordings for these songs, which Jez originally sent to the producers of the Radio Ballads series, recently showed up again, so with any luck we may end up hearing some obscure songs along with some of his better-known Radio Ballads compositions like TAKING ON MEN, BLACK TRADE and THE WRONG BUS, all of which have been extensively covered by other artists. Watch out for further details about this, and enjoy the show on Sunday.