Jennifer Reid & Paul Brown @ Ōmiha Folk Club
Join us for a special performance featuring Jennifer Reid and Paul Brown trading ballads and broadsides to illustrate the shared cultures of Lancashire and Dundee, and the song traditions that would have been active in the two cities during the Industrial Revolution.
Lancashire dialect folk singer and broadside balladeer Jennifer Reid moves between worlds with ease. Rooted in archives and oral histories, her work braids nineteenth-century music with the present: teaching, performing, researching, sharing, advocating and supporting spaces for memory and making in the tradition.
The singer, who has been described as having irreverent puckish vim, has worked with industry greats John Cooper Clarke, Eliza Carthy, and Shane Meadows amongst others, and studied at Oxford University, specialising in the ballad collections of Manchester. Her research has taken her from Venice to Dhaka via New York, where she asked whether the Industrial Revolution ever really ended. She has spoken on weaving songs in Bangladesh and Manchester, worked with scientists, poets, musicians, historians and universities and still finds time to sing stories that refuse to be forgotten.
Jennifer is joined by special guest Dundonian folk singer and legend of the Auckland folk scene Paul Brown. Says Jenn of Paul: Paul Brown’s style is brash, unapologetic and historically accurate. A vocal Scotsman is needed in most every music scene and I’m pleased that Aotearoa can boast of him, for he is certainly a firebrand and he knows his stuff.
To the devotee of union and work song, Paul Brown is a master of the form. His songs are powerfully moving, anti war and anti authoritarian, and his Dundee accent is a pleasure to listen to. Paul comes from a line of strong Dundonian women; so has a direct connection to the nimble-fingered, hard working, hard drinking ‘mill lassies’, who feature prominently in his repertoire.
Paul believes in celebrating the working classes and using the power of song to change the system. Hel sings with his audience, not at them, so singing choruses is compulsory!
Please note we do not have eftpos facilities. BYO event.
