It’s bad luck to say good luck on opening night - so what do you say instead? What you say is Break a Leg (and friends).
It’s true. In this instance we fall into the category of ‘and friends’ and we were invited by the band Break a Leg (see what we did?) to play in Sheffield to raise some much needed funds for the S6 foodbank.
Beth being from Leeds - she counts anything south of there, the south of the country. This meant that this gig was our southern premiere! How exciting.
Now, jazz is a very contentious issue in our band. It is a divisive genre. Luckily, we believe Break a Leg to fit in to ‘soft jazz’ or sometimes ‘swing’ which the whole band find both enjoyable and palatable. Beth was particularly delighted at a cover of ‘I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire’ by The Inkspots. This, of course, led to a band discussion about what we call The Jazz Spectrum. This ranges from ‘soft jazz’ to ‘WTF is this and do any of them know what the other is playing?’ Beth calls it ‘overstimulating’ while Katy settled for ‘awful’. Break a Leg certainly fit on the right side of this spectrum (which is on the left) and left us crooning and clicking out fingers on the off-beat.
Next up was the world-premiere for Becky Dunn. Now, the jazz conversation must have got to the band more than we thought, as Katy slid from her seat, quit the band, and joined Becky on stage. There were lovely renditions of several songs and a finisher of Wagon Wheel. The rest of the band admitted that it was even better than the jam and marshmallow kind. Which is pretty good.
We chucked an Oh No! CD into the raffle (as we tend to do) and eagerly awaited our number being drawn so we could take it back. But as always it was a fix and we lost both our CD and a quid. Bugger.
At this point we need to say a HUGE thank you to everyone that braved the 400 mile an hour winds (Dean had beans for tea) to come to the bowling club. It was you that made the night so great! We were so happy that the room was packed and DELIGHTED that people actually got up and danced. I mean, if you can’t dance to murder, what can you dance to? But you lot didn’t just dance - you laughed at Ian’s joke and only took the mick out of his banjo once - thank you, it means a lot.
What means even more is that fact that everyone, during such hard times, managed to scrape together £480 for the S6 foodbank. This is a great sum, and we are so happy to have been a small part of helping such a fab organisation, but it shouldn’t be needed in modern Britain. So, just remember - while the PM is taking a private plane to Leeds, S6 are operating 13 foodbanks in Sheffield alone. S6 are also just one ‘brand’ of foodbank in Sheffield, there are other organisations that also run them. Red, blue, yellow, green - it doesn’t matter, we need to start making sure that our politicians are doing better. We are all much closer to a foodbank than we will ever be to chartering a private plane from London to Leeds.
We feel very lucky and humbled to be surrounded by people that give their time, talent, and money to help those in need.
Love, harmonies, cwtch,
Kootch x