blog — Kootch

It’s a pun! The title is a pun! Yay! So, we played Doncaster Roots and Acoustic Club last Friday. We were supporting a gentleman that we are now a little ashamed we didn’t really know much of - Luke Daniels. Luke is absolutely phenomenal. He has played with lots of bands, orchestras, but if you get a chance to see him on his own, do it. Drop everything and do it. Drop the meeting, drop the catch up with friends you haven’t seen in ages, drop the baby, go.see.him.

So, the train was booked, the hotel was booked and the library was… booked. We were starting a new rock and roll chapter of our lives where (even for just one night) we felt like we were ‘on the road’.

When we first hit Doncaster it felt like we had travelled forward in time. As we pressed the button and waited to be able to cross the road, the little green man flashed up and we walked. Then, as we hit the middle of the road, a countdown from 15 began.. It was actually telling us how long we had left until the lights changed. We had seen the future, and it began in Doncaster… Of all places.

We headed to the hotel to check in and then we headed straight to the nearest bistro… Spoons. Beth resisted the urge to have two chilli con carne’s for £7.49 to herself, but her will is only so strong and she inhaled a large portion of onion rings, all to herself (and now everyone knows why Dean is so thin).

Then we had a nice small mooch to the venue (Beth more or less rolled). Inside, the stage was already set and Luke was already tuning up. Having being blown away by his sound check, Beth and Dean exchanged a glance and ordered two pints of the finest soda water.

After our sound check (and a big shout out here to Stuart, a truly great sound man for the club, got us sounding just how we wanted) Luke gave us a tour of the Polyphon. What is a polyphon, we hear you ask? Well, we’re still not really sure. It’s from the 80’s. This is folk music, after all, so yes, we’re talking about the 1880’s, obviously. All we can really tell you is that it is old. That Luke is some kind of magician that uses sorcery and complicated spells to make the thing not only work, but so it can loop (as you can only store 100 seconds of music on one disk). Using a complicated mix of herbs and spices he transposes the music he wants onto these big disks. Much like the pianos that used to play themselves, the holes in the disks would give complicated light signals to little elves that would then run around plucking the notes in the sequence that you wanted them to. (This is definitely 100% how Luke described it to us, by the way).

Tonight was a special night. It was the weekend of Pete’s birthday, and he would have been 65 on the Sunday (10th). So, the night had a bit of talk about Pete. We aired ‘This Old Guitar’ for the first time and it felt really good to hear people laugh in the right places.

Luke then took the stage and blew our heads off. The button box, the polyphon, the guitar, the piano and a really mellow and crisp voice. There really is nothing more we could have wanted from a night out. When he finished we picked our bits of brain and skull off the floor and rolled our tongues and eyes back into what was left of our heads. We shook hands and exchanged CD’s (lovely man, but there really is no accounting for taste) and a very lovely couple from the venue gave us a lift back to our hotel.

We are used to the idle, quiet, country life and having a room in a town centre was an eye-opener. Literally. We couldn’t sleep. So Kootch’s night ended with some Family Guy, followed by American Dad, followed by room service of two MASSIVE plates of nacho’s. We then fell asleep to the dulcet tones of Gerald, the chartered accountant, vomming up all his weeks woes in the room next door. Cheers Gez.