TWO of Dorset’s best-known folk musicians, Tim Laycock and Alastair Braidwood, have recorded a new album of folk songs, readings and storytelling, Friends & Neighbours. They also have a short tour, including performances at Athelhampton House on Friday 3rd October and Bere Regis Folk Night at the Drax Arms on Tuesday 28th.
A much-loved and critically acclaimed folk musician, singer, actor and historian, Tim Laycock has recently been awarded an English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) gold badge, recognising his life-long contribution to folk music and associated traditions.
He is joined by his protégé Alastair Braidwood for To Yollow Autumn Turn’d, an evening of traditional folk songs and music, readings and storytelling relating to the turning of the year towards autumn – the harvest, countryside ways and, most importantly, cider!
Alastair Braidwood is an actor, musician and singer born and bred in Dorset who, with Tim, has created this show celebrating the Westcountry traditions and rural ways, developed over the last several years. The duo have also recorded their first album together, celebrated with an autumn tour around the south of England.e of.
Alastair says: “We’re both very excited to be bringing our music to so many lovely venues through the autumn. Some are firm favourites with whom we’ve built a rapport over the last few years, and some are quite new to us. We look forward to making lots of new folky friends in these places, as well as seeing again some old ones.”
Tim and Alastair’s unaccompanied close-harmony singing has proved particularly popular with audiences in the past, and mixed with toe-tapping traditional tunes and readings of poems and stories from Thomas Hardy and William Barnes, an evening with these two ends up being educational as well as entertaining.
Expect the strains of squeezebox blended with the shrill piping of the six-hole whistle, performing tunes that were enjoyed and danced to in Dorset 200 years ago. The burr of Dorset dialect in Barnes’s poetry brings a bucolic idyll of rural life into the room – and even the Hardy extracts avoid the tragic bits!
The CD was launched in September at the Mill House Cider Museum.
Photographs by Dorset Morri’arty