Evening of folk music

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33446, 30 January 1974, Page 18

Evening of folk music

Ask a New Zealander to an evening of his country’s folk music and he might go, reluctantly, expecting something second-rate. If he went with that impression to the folk concert put on last evening by the Banks Peninsula Folk Club, he would have left with the feeling that he had been too quick to judge. A casually attired crowd of young people in the Limes Room at the Town Hall last evening, broken here and there by everyone’s stereotype of a back-country hermit, were guarded in their response for a start. However, the performers had a disarming ease. They peppered their items with anecdotes and comments.

It took the Canterbury Crutchings Bush and Ceilidh Band to make the audience totally responsive. Trevor Giblin, an Australian member of the band, was its star performer. With a voice like a rasp, a good volume and an equally good command of Strine, he gave a clever recitation of bush poetry. Dave Moore, who has only recently joined the club, added a touch of the philosophical and lyrical to what might have otherwise become a little much of the “Click go the Shears” repertoire. Phil Garland sang the parochial New Zealand songs. “The day the pub burned down,” “The Leather Man,” “The odd lampoon,” “The Old Identity,” and a New Zealand love song (a rare creation) called “The Culler’s Lament.”

The show was rollicking, rousing, sometimes ribald. But it was fun. and friendlv. —B.K.C.