Hotel Gosford’s First Saturday Blues will be back on May 6.
The National Folk Festival is finished for another year and St Albans Folk Festival will be done and dusted, leaving folksy Coasties hankering for another folk fix.
Houseband BluesAngels, 7-9pm, are putting on their folk hats for a fix of fine folk-furiosity with Hugh Worrall breaking cover on guitar, vocals, maybe even whistles and kalimba, Cec Bucello adding another alt-folk original to the night and frontman, Tom Flood doubling as sideman in the second act.
Twenty-eight years ago, Tom moved from Chippendale to Katoomba, and on his first night out, packing his harmonica tin in search of live music, a non-trad Irish session at The Family Hotel, just down the road, he struck up a friendship with the only muso not playing Irish covers, folk guitar wizard/singer and artist Graham Hallett.
In the next decade, Graham played with a number of outfits, particularly Keith Young’s Irish/English, The Ragamuffins, all over the State and at the National in Canberra.
Meanwhile Tom and Graham held down a long weekly residency at The Parakeet in Katoomba and guested at other cafes around town, always unplugged, covering American alt-country and mid-Atlantic folk, but with Tom establishing a fiction writing vocation and Graham accelerating his life as a painter, the music never left town.
Later they were stalwarts at the Duffy’s Clarendon sessions and occasionally in the Duffy’s Fab Folk collective, but never played Blue Mountains Music Festival, preferring to remain off-grid.
The long collaboration ended when Tom left the mountains for the Central Coast in 2003.
Seven years later, the BluesAngels trio of Tom, Cec and Frank Russell began to tread the boards, and the rest is local folk blues history.
Over the following years, people mentioned to Tom they’d really like to see the Hallett/Flood duo again, and a few months back, while scanning for a second act at Hotel Gosford, Tom thought why not?
He rang Graham, now a well-known Blue Mountains landscape painter, cajoled him out of his tiny, oil-smeared studio (“But I haven’t picked up a guitar in three years”) and they began putting sets together in the glow of the mountains’ autumn.
On May 6, Hallett/Flood Redux will debut 9-11pm at Hotel Gosford, right after Blues Angels, with songs from writers Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Mayfield, Gillian Welch, John Prine, Ronee Blakley, Paul Siebel, Fred Neil, Jackson Frank, T-Bone Walker and Tom Flood.
It may be a once-only experience.
It may be the seeding of a new phase.
What it will be is not to be missed.
BluesAngels and Hallett/Flood, free, plus good food till 8:30pm and cakes/beverages till late at the revamped 1930s Hotel Gosford.
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Apr 18, 2017
Tom Flood, BluesAngels