Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

Touring America to any English band must be a revelation. Americans are spontaneous and make great audiences. They freed us from more constraints. It has been a long road losing those English inhibitions. 5 nights at the LA Forum with Jethro Tull. 18.000 seats. We were opening our set at the time with the Lyke Wake Dirge, a grim piece of music from Yorkshire concerning pergatory and we all dressed in dramatic mummers ribbons with tall hats. The effect was stunning. 5 gaunt figures in line across the front of the stage, lit from below casting huge shadows, intoning this insistent dirge alarmed some members of the audience whose reality was already tampered with by 70s substances. It was most satisfying.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• British folk revival (1) W/G ·
• Dirge (1) W/G ·
• Folk music (10) W/G ·
• Folk rock (1) W/G ·
• Hallucination (1) W/G ·
• Hallucinogen (1) W/G ·
• Jethro Tull (1) W/G ·
• John Tobler (1) W/G ·
• Kia Forum (1) W/G ·
• Los Angeles (1) W/G ·
• Lyke-Wake Dirge (1) W/G ·
• Maddy Prior (1) W/G ·
• Mummers’ play (1) W/G ·
• Music (26) W/G ·
• Shadow (1) W/G ·
• Song (20) W/G ·
• Steeleye Span (1) W/G ·
• United States (20) W/G ·

All tags.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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Similar

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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How much is Kitson influenced by the description of the village band in Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, published 16 years before?

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