About me
I grew up in Somerset, England. Teenage life involved Friday nights spent down at the Red Lion disco in Somerton, art lessons with Mrs Green and listening to Billy Bragg, getting into folk music, playing piano, whistles and flute, summers with trips to the Sidmouth Folk Festival and Cropredy.
Hamburg, Germany was the next stop. Going to open mike nights at Logo, learning to play the guitar and getting involved in a couple of folk bands. I started singing more. Tara and Dylan, my children, soon arrived on the scene, amidst a life working behind the bar of our pub, Froggy’s. Friday evenings were open mike, gigs on Saturdays, Sunday afternoon was teatime and music around the table. Loopay was the greatest folk band 🙂
Konstanz, in the south of Germany is the current stop! Thanks to Alex, music has moved even more into focus; I started writing more songs after a truly inspiring week on a songwriting course in Scotland, given by Karine Polwart & Findlay Napier. This provided the inspiration and motivation to write the songs for my first album: Shift in Time.
Now please explore the Rosebay Willow Herb Cafe some more. A place where I scribble down notes about the music projects I’m doing. Come on in….
Taste the music in the air. Lick your lips for the tang of tunes tripping over tables, mixing into conversations, growing with the dry pitter-patter of salt spilling onto a piece of paper, curling into the cigarette smoke sneaking in at the door. Hear and feel the judder of someone scraping back a chair. And sense the heat of a rush of steam into a frothing can of milk. Now take the menu. The Rosebay Willow Herb Cafe brings a ballad with your burger. Serves a shanty on the side with your sandwich. You can add a shot of polka to your pretty vodka. Then lean back. And meet….
Folk Cow
If you like hot tamales with your BBQ then Folk Cow could be the right music with your order today. Folk Cow plays music till the cows come home – Irish tunes, American old time and folk-pimped pop songs on fiddle, whistle, banjo, guitar, bodhran, Jew’s harp, washboard. Moo!
Meet the herd: Annette Flow (whistle, flute), Bill Flowe (fiddle, banjo), Heather Fyson (guitar, flute), Claudiw Widmann (washboard), Volker Widmann (Jew’s Harp, bodhran)
Ladies First
Ladies First serve musical sweetmeats based on their homemade recipes mixing folk & blues, instrumental sounds and singing; on bass, hang drum, guitars and flutes. The ladies are: Heather Fyson, Thea Tanneberger und Gaby Wunderlich.
If you go through the door into Heather’s Place…
…this door’ll take you out into the yard round the back of the Rosebay Willow Herb Cafe. It’s pretty messy out here, which is why I tend to keep the door closed most of the time. But I sometimes come out here. More often lately. It’s the place in my mind I go to, half asleep on the sofa with the credits of some film flickering on the TV before me. And dream. Allowing words, gestures, pictures and short snaps of conversation to pass. I might linger on one. Tease it through my fingers to see if there’s a knot to untangle, releasing a scratchy red mitten or a sharp, broken piece of glass. Smarting back to a shift in time. A couple of notes reminding of a song. Some sticky tune.
Rosebay Willow Herb Cafe 