Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

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. Five nights at the LA forum with Jethro Tull, 18,000 seats. We were opening our set with the Lyke Wake Dirge, a grim piece of music from Yorkshire concerning purgatory, and we all dressed in dramatic mummers’ ribbons with tall hats. The effect was stunning. Five 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.

Order the book

Subscribe to the free daily email

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.

Abbreviations:

• ER: East Riding
• GM: Greater Manchester
• NR: North Riding
• NY: North Yorkshire
• SY: South Yorkshire
• WR: West Riding
• WY: West Yorkshire

Comment

Comment

Something to say? Get in touch

Original

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. Five nights at the LA forum with Jethro Tull, 18,000 seats. We were opening our set with the Lyke Wake Dirge, a grim piece of music from Yorkshire concerning purgatory and we all dressed in dramatic mummers ribbons with tall hats. The effect was stunning. Five 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.

119 words.

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) ·
• Dirge (1) ·
• Folk music (10) ·
• Folk rock (1) ·
• Hallucination (1) ·
• Hallucinogen (1) ·
• Jethro Tull (1) ·
• Kia Forum (1) ·
• Los Angeles (1) ·
• Lyke-Wake Dirge (1) ·
• Maddy Prior (1) ·
• Mummers’ play (1) ·
• Music (25) ·
• Shadow (1) ·
• Song (20) ·
• Steeleye Span (1) ·
• United States (18) ·

All tags.

Similar

• 27 January 1830: William Cobbett rides from Leeds to black Sheffield
• 27 March 1690: At the première of an ode celebrating the “chief agents” of the Glorious Revolution – “the city and county of York” – London Yorkshiremen hear of domestic decline since Roman rule
• 15 December 1888: Frank Kidson longs for Leeds’s musical Christmasses past
• 15 December 1888: Leeds’s most popular wassailing song, according to Frank Kidson
• 18 February 1889: An effigy of Jack Nelson, wife-beater, is paraded with rough music through Hedon (Holderness) by a furious crowd
• 31 March 1851: The Leeds abolitionist Wilson Armistead submits his census return, including the names of two lodgers – the escaped American slaves, William and Ellen Craft
• 11 May 1985: A fire at the Bradford City stadium kills 56
• 27 June 1933: Norman Harding (4) of Burmantofts, Leeds, meets his baby brother, Keith, for the first time
• 12 June 1832: William Hirst, “father of the Yorkshire woollen trade,” composes a press advert pleading for rescue from ruin
• 29 September 1684: It being Michaelmas, the Jolly Pinder of Wakefield (in song) deserts his beasts and pound and joins Robin Hood in the greenwood