Well we have been looking forward to this event for what seems like a year now, and finally the weekend rolled around.  We headed down from Enfield dropped Poppy off en route with my folks in Crick.

The event took place in the Wycliffe Rooms in Lutterworth,  a venue that has some very fond recollections for us in Beach Boy world,  Val has thrown some brilliant events there in the past, including  Jeffrey Foskett and Billy Hinsche’s visit there during which Jeffrey actually chose that event to announce the release of Brian Wilson’s version of ‘Smile’. We had the Denny day in 2004, where we were joined by the lovely Trisha Campo and one of Dennis’s good friends Stan Shapiro. The last time Liz and I were there was to see Stephen Kalinich and Richard Durrants  superb Galactic Symphonies.

This time of course we were celebrating 50 years of this wonderful band.

Kingsley Abbott

Val introduced the event and set us up for all the treats we had install for us.  Kingsley Abbott took to the stage and shared his journey into the world of Beach Boys fandom, which was great!  It made me think of my journey, being at school and no one understanding why I loved this music so the wilderness years as it were, and then in the 80’s probably courtesy of the ‘Made in the USA’ album finding the address for ‘Stomp’ which lead to years and years of wonderful times and friendships and events such as these….

Sean Mcreavy got the music off to a brilliant start he was joined on stage by Rob Dean , they treated us to such a beautiful Dennis Wilson/Stephen Kalinich medley, ‘A time to live in dreams’ segued beautifully into Be Still, Little Bird, Rob Dean gave us an emotional rendering of ‘Home’ this to me was the highlight of the weekend really… I just hope someone managed to capture it on film.

The cool thing about this event was we didn’t just have the music of The Beach Boys, some would disagree with me, but  I liked the eclectic mix we had on offer over the weekend.

Val as some of you may know is also a member of a choir, her choir are all ladies but the lady who runs the group also ha a male choir so they merged especially for  our entertainment pleasure and di beautiful versions of ‘God Only Knows’ followed by ‘In My Room’ we were left wanting more, maybe next time hey Val 🙂

The musicians that took to the stage were Nicky Johns who is a brilliant folk singer, she treated us to her version of ‘Love and Mercy’ Vivienne Drewitt managed to capture the music over the weekend so the video selections are courtesy of her thanks Viv, here is the link to all of her videos

Nicky Johns doing Love and Mercy, Nicky set a theme and the other acts were asked to follow her lead and do their versions of ‘Love and Mercy which was a brilliant idea..

James Crowther had found the acts for us, next up were The Big I am, two chaps with mandolins who were brilliant!

There was a young man and his guitar, he was astounding!  remined me a lot of Nick Drakes album ‘Tamworth in Arden’, he had such an unusual guitar style, and has alreday been played on radio 2 by Paul Jones! his name is Jack Blackman one to watch out for!

The event we were all waiting for was of course ‘Surfs Up’ playing the whole of the ‘Wild Honey’ album. Wow and did they live up to our expectations such a great album, the album that really got everyone to chill and go back to the music after all the Smile and Sgt Pepper’s of the world. its a rather short album so it was great to hear them flesh it out with ‘Been way too long’ and also Sean’s play with Here comes the night adding the disco version was genius as lets face it.. as he said we all do love it really!  well I know I do!

I was looking forward to hearing ‘Let The Wind Blow’ and ‘Country Air’ they sounded great live!

I think its fair to say we all had a wonderful day!  great to see old friends and share our love of all things Beach Boys!

Published On: December 3rd, 2011 / Categories: Blogs, Life, Music / Tags: , /