Fangirl
Squeeeeee. 
I have a mad friend. Well, I have several mad friends.* This particular mad friend is a major goer to concerts of folk and Celtic music, and we bonded a while ago over the fact that Steeleye Span rules.** I think it was last year that I missed dragging Peter to a relatively local Steeleye concert by not finding out about it till something like three days after it happened.*** Major ratbags. Major bulging purulent ratbags.
So this year Fiona rang me up a couple of months ago and said, hi. Steeleye Span is going to be playing in Salisbury on 19 November.† I’ve bought two front-row tickets. I’ll swing round and pick you up at about 5:30, okay?
Blah! Brah! Arrgh! Augh! Let me not leave out of the story that Fiona lives about an hour from here, and an hour in the wrong direction.
But . . . Steeleye Span. And they’re not coming any closer, this year. And I don’t really do long-distance driving any more.††
Okay, I said cravenly. Thanks.
There’s nothing like going somewhere for the first time in the dark and I don’t think we got there exactly the most efficient way. But we got there.†††
And it was heaven.‡
Squeee. 
I don’t know who the old broad on the left is (great cardigan though‡‡) but that’s Maddy Prior.
* * *
* Like calls to like.
** Her trajectory is her own. Mine was that I was living in the back woods of Maine in the early 70s, turned on the radio one day and heard ‘Alison Gross.’^ It was like absolutely nothing I’d ever heard in my life before and I was riveted. It nonetheless took me several more years and moving to Manhattan to discover the whole Celtic/traditional music thing. Blew my head off. I know that I’ve tended here in the blog to emphasize classical over all else but that is to some extent a function of the fact that I have Radio Three going about twenty hours out of twenty-four^^ which barring the occasional burst of so-called world music, which does occasionally include Celtic, is mostly classical. But good ‘folk’ music has always got me hard right where I live, an awful lot of the classical composers I’m most attracted to use a lot of folk music—and the stuff I write or am trying to write is as clearly bent folk as it is bent classical.
Thirty years ago if you’d asked me whether I’d rather my fairy godmother gave me a voice like Marilyn Horne’s or Maddy Prior’s, I’d’ve had to stop and think about it.
^http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/s/steeleye_span/alison_gross.html
I’m a little uneasy about the copyright, but if you poke the video button, you also get them singing it. And (almost) forty years later+ it still gives me that thrill of something new and wonderful.
+ Forty years. My gods. How time flies as you keep breathing. 
^^ The other four are talking heads and jazz. I’ve heard some live jazz that was as good as anything of any kind I’ve ever heard, but there’s almost none I’ll listen to on the radio or CD. I used to have the same block about organ music, but a combination of Messiaen and Oisin seems to have done me up there. The jazz equivalent has not yet arrived in my life.
*** Thank you, Park Records. And I think I have marketing problems.
† This year’s flyer from Park Records arrived yesterday.
†† ME, my little friend. Not. I’ve told you, haven’t I, that that split-second alertness necessary when you’re behind the wheel—and which most people with no strange auto-immune defects aren’t even really aware of—is a nightmare when the ME’s active. And if I’m behind the wheel very long, it makes the ME active.
††† The scenic route is somehow . . . not so scenic, after dark.
‡ I’m too tired^ to make the kind of sense I’d like to, but it really amuses the ungleblarg out of me seeing all these old people blazing away up there on stage. Yes. It’s true. People over fifty^^ still have lives and energy and ideas and good stuff to share. Maddy is delicious for a variety of reasons but one of them is that she demonstrably couldn’t care less that she’s past it by the usual beach babe standard. She’s up there wearing lace and bright colours^^^ and dancing—dancing gracefully. We should all get to age like Maddy Prior is ageing.
I was also reminded that while, up till my road to Damascus conversion rather recently on the subject of the classical violin, I was not a fan, I’ve always loved ‘fiddle’. And Peter Knight is amazing. There was a point during the selkie song that I swear he was double-bowing and plucking all at the same time—is this physically possible?—he sounded like an entire string section all by himself. And while he has an electric fiddle, he spent most of the evening on an acoustic one that had its very own microphone.^^^^
^ Watching Fiona do all the driving really wore me out
^^ Even over sixty.
^^^ I urgently want to know where she buys her clothes. She was wearing a lavender and pink and white layered, very very full and twirly skirt in the second half that I might have tried to steal, only I didn’t want to embarrass Fiona.
^^^^ There are advantages to being introduced to the band by someone who knows them. Peter Knight hugged Fiona, so when she introduced me to him he hugged me.
‡‡ It is so too warm today to be wearing that cardigan. But I was DETERMINED to wear it to the concert. So I did. Gasp. Swelter.
Been there, done that, got the t shirt. 
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