Two this week.
Tonight (well, technically last night now) I last-minute-random-picked The Sounds of The Sirens at the NCEM. Joint venture by the Crescent and the Black Swan Folk club. Ticket bought about 6:50, faffed a bit, nipped out on my bike about 20 past 7 and got there as the support (Nick Parker, google tells me, who I liked and who made me laugh) was just getting going. Acoustics in the NCEM are blinking glorious, and thoroughly suited lovely vocal harmonies and the various combinations of guitars, mandolin and piano that we were treated to by the headlining pair. Excellent banter too, and a before 10pm finish with a 5 minute bike ride home - just the ticket for a random pick to cheer me up that I was being sensible by not going up to Edinburgh for the second hometown gig on the Willson Williams tour.
The other one was the *first* hometown gig on the Willson Williams tour in Newcastle - Gosforth Civic on Thursday. Silly train-assisted gigging adventure on a school night - not sensible but worth it. They are utterly and completely glorious - I love both separately, and together they are chaoticallly splendid. I love the way that they cancel out each other's completely unwarranted imposter syndromes, and find it mildly astonishing that they actually managed to record an album together between all the bloody laughing.
I got recognised as CrinklyLion, at the merch desk, by another member of their Patreon/lockdown livestream gangs (I think it was the person we sometimes refer to as not 'the' but OUR Linda Thomson) and then a chap who looked very vaguely familiar looked at me, slightly perplexed and said 'Kath?'. Which greatly confused me initially since we were queuing at Kath Williams' merch desk... and there's only been a very limited bit of my life when *anyone* called me Kath. Kathryn or Kat, yes, Kathy absolutely never, but Kath... that was a few people in the Lancaster years...
"It is Kath, isn't it? From Lancaster?"
"You do look sort of... familiar?" (I'm atrocious at recognising people and seeing resemblances - have always sucked at the 'match the adult to their childhood photo' game)
"I'm Scott. Friend of Merry and Mike"
"erm..." (trying to work out which of my five years and three separate cohorts as an undergraduate there that would be)
Then, to the great entertainment of several people nearby in the merch queue (including our Linda Thomson) he said:
"You were Wank Woman"
before hastily adding
"...in that play with Merry"
Which is how Scott and I ended up explaining *that* moniker to Kathryn Williams and Withered Hand Dan as I paid for my vinyl. Deano meanwhile, seemed to be quietly pissing himself about it having heard before (but maybe not totally believed before?) the story about how for one tenth of my degree I spent six weeks reading a truly mind-altering volume* of Mills and Boon novels as research for a devised play about romantic fiction that me and a random American JYA student (The Merrydown-drinking Meredith) wrote and performed (despite both of us being lighting techs rather than Actors really, but there were no actors left by the time us billy-no-mates were trying to find a group to work with so we made the best of it) as a two-hander which our feminist theatre tutor, Gerry, fucking *loved* and gave us very-nearly-firsts for. I guess one of the characters I played in it was really *quite* memorable...
Turns out Scott (a singer-songwriter among other things these days and also on a train-assisted Silly Gigging Adventure far from home) is a big 'ol WW fan too and was recently an attendee on a songwriting workshop Willson Williams were both tutoring on so can indeed be spotted at about three seconds in and then a few times after in their video for "Weekend", one of the album tracks, which they filmed at said songwriting retreat -
https://youtu.be/44sv-ZPnLuw?si=PqNLgui1dUl0ehfkAnyway, Willson Williams. They are amazing, and you should go and see them if you can.
*no joke. Merry scored a couple of thousand of 'em from a closing down bookshop in, iirc, Morecambe. Covered half the set with them, put one on every seat in the auditorium as an audience gift, with the programme inside, and between the two of us actually read about 900 of 'em of which I accounted for about 600.
