Rhyl Folk Club

With a capacity crowd and a long list of singers, Andrew rolled up the sleeves of his K.F.C. shirt (other take-aways are available) and got off to an early start. If you want to see everyone who sang, look at the collage at the bottom, the list is too long to mention everyone in the blog.

It was a delight to see and hear some of the “old-timers” who had made the effort to be at the club on our 50th anniversary. Darryl got “premature clap” when, merely pausing in his song to take a swig from his pint of Chilean merlot, some of the audience thought (wished?) he’d finished and put their hands together. I owe a great personal debt to Darryl for his encouragement when I first started at the club over 25 years ago. If you think I’m crap now, you should have heard me then!

Hadyn Smith, looking very dapper, first sang at the club in 1966, and despite having to be somewhere else on the night managed to turn up to give a moving version of “The Fish Finger Blues”.

I’m not sure how Brian got through “All the little chickens”, with the wall of sound of farmyard animals coming back at him. Brian looks almost as young as ever (due to the picture in his attic), but alas, Jeff seems to have now stopped exfoliating and using his moisturiser and is showing 6 of the 7 signs of ageing; the only one he fails to demonstrate is rigor mortis. Jeff has been doing much of the graft for the club for years and doesn’t get the recognition he deserves. That unfortunately doesn’t stop me taking the piss.

Thanks to all the ladies who provided the food and to everyone who brought stuff for the raffle. Except Mike Hawkins. Those who read last weeks summary may remember he returned a perfectly good bottle of booze which he then won for a second time. Sure enough it returned again this week. Hopefully it has now gone to a good home where it will be treated with more care and respect.

It was fitting that young Mathew finished off the evening, after hearing the people who had carried the club through it’s first 50 years. Billy Connolly once likened life to a bus journey, where people keep getting off, sometimes before their stop. Over the years we’ve lost a few; Mike Hand, Kristen, Lindsay and of course, Ted. Due to the demographics of the club, it’s inevitable that more of us will be standing up and ringing the bell and we seem unable to attract a younger element to come and have a laugh on a Friday night, with the predictable end result of Mathew singing to an empty room (or a row of urns). We hope Mathew got his parents back to the home safely.

Guest night next week – Peter and Barbara Snape.

This entry was posted on April 19, 2014 at 11:11 am and is filed under Club Night - What happened?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.