Meeting a hero

Dear all,

 

My UK tour has begun and the opening two gigs were absolute crackers. First up was a premiere of the Dan Walsh trio with fabulous fiddler Patsy Reid and mighty mandolinist Nic Zuppardi at Bury MET theatre and it was bloody fantastic, we had a wonderful time. The walk from the theatre back to my car was somewhat interesting. Bury on a Friday night is quite an experience I tell you…Anyway the next night it was up to Durham to play in a launderette. Yes you did read that correctly. The Old Cinema Launderette is a cracking wee venue in Durham and it was a lovely gig with a great crowd and I was cooked extremely nice poached eggs afterwards. This week it’s off dan saf to play in Baldock tomorrow night at Baldock and Letchworth Folk Club and a first visit to Plymouth on Friday to play the B Bar. I’m really enjoying being on tour over here again, I really must remind myself more often how much I love my job 🙂

 

The hilarious spam comments have kept coming in by the way (see previous blog). I almost feel like I should allow them to be published just so you can see how ludicrous they are. The last one actually had the words pirate and hacker in amongst an incredibly long email address. I also had an email from ‘Barclays’ claiming that my account had been suspended amid suspected fraudulent activity. Now I actually bank with Barclays so this concerned me a tiny bit until I noticed the email address whence it was sent was info@santander.co.uk. Seriously guys do try.


But anyway, here’s the best bit. I was told that Leo Moran of the Saw Doctors was playing in Newcastle on Sunday night and as I was playing in Durham the night before it seemed a good chance to get in and watch the gig and indeed meet the man himself. Those of you unfamiliar with the band, they’re a cracking Irish band who wrote wonderful songs and indeed formed the soundtrack to many of my family holidays and car journeys when I was growing up. I love the band dearly and recently was in touch with Leo as I recorded his song At Least Pretend on my last album and, weirdly, his son Jimmy did sound for me at my gig in Galway last year and filmed me doing the song and showed it to his dad. We’ve since been in touch on facebook. Anyway, thanks to the wonderful Marty Craggs of Lindisfarne fame I only ended up playing on two of the Saw Doctors’ most famous songs with the man himself! It was like a little childhood dream came true and there is video footage posted on my facebook page www.facebook.com/danwalshmusic. You can see how much I was smiling, it was one of those moments that sum up why you become a musician!

 

See you soon y’all,
Danjo

 

By the way I have no idea why all these gaps are so enormous.