Danny Spooner + Goodly Sport @ The Loaded Dog
8pm, Saturday 27th September 2008
Posted Thursday, August 21, 2008
Danny Spooner loves to sing about working people. For 30 years he's sung at festivals, clubs and house concerts in Europe, England, Canada and the USA. There and in Australia audiences have enjoyed his concert brackets, workshops and one-man shows, his deep multi-disciplinary understanding of social history, his personal warmth, and his immense repertoire of songs covering the full range of human emotions, endeavours and experiences … He is a spellbinder who can make traditional music seem new and can make new songs seem old. Danny has recorded CDs ranging from sensitive love songs, to shanties, and traditional Australian songs of toil and reward.
Singer of traditional and contemporary folk songs of Britain and Australia - solo acoustic singer, guitar and concertina. Danny Spooner's passion is the expression of British and Australian culture through folk music.
Danny Spooner then took centre stage and with his booming voice and stage presence had us all enchanted with his many tales of the sea and his own life experiences. He always has lots of little historical tidbits to share with his audience. Songs ran the gamut from haunting songs of the whaling industry, to songs about racehorses and trade unions. He had us raising the roof. (Dawn Davies, 2006)
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Goodly Sport, a small a capella group whose members aim to produce an excellent sound together, singing songs in unaccompanied harmony from the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Goodly Sport is: Jennifer Brian, Sasha Curthoys, Nicholas Gilbert and Annabel Stender. We hope you enjoy listening to us as much as we love these pieces.
After the break, there followed the typical Dog policy of "and now for something completely different”, a wonderful set from a subset of Goodly Sport, a medieval singing group. They sang in the true a’capella medieval style, and it was lovely to hear the old style harmonies. They gave a rendition of the well-known Agincourt Carol to a very old tune and performed a number of short pieces by Ravenscroft, a medieval writer, including "The Owl", which they sang in three parts. They also performed two numbers in the madrigal style. While initially a little tentative the performance became stronger and more confident as the set progressed. Yummy, there should be more of this music. Maybe we can get the whole choir back next year. (Review by Dawn Davies, 2007)
