A heartwarming tale from New Year’s Day

Here’s a heartwarming story for the start of 2020… Earlier this year, I asked my pal Ali Mackenzie (Ireland’s greatest bass player) if he’d fancy getting a 40-minute set of songs by his mid-90s band the Bush Turkeys together for a four-band charity show I was running in September (featuring popular mid-90s Belfast bar bands reuniting as a one-off).

I hadn’t expected Ali to go the whole hog (or three-quarters of it) and get three of the four from the classic Turkeys line-up together: Ludo on vocals, Dave on drums, and himself – plus relative youngster and local blues sensation Lonesome Chris Todd fastidiously figuring out the electric guitar parts of various former members from recordings. The Bush Turkeys were notoriously prone to rows, fracas, rancour, brouhahas and fallings-out back in the day. Would it manage to hang together long enough to do the charity gig…?

Well… it did. And not only that, their 8-song set proved the audience hit of the night. Three months on, yesterday – the 30th anniversary to the very day of their first gig – the chaps performed an 18-song set at a packed bar in Belfast. Again, the response was sensational. 😀

The Bush Turkeys’ yacht rock sound (a dash of southern rock, a dash of country-rock, a dash of folk-rock) always seemed a bit out of time in the 90s. It seems less out of time now, strangely. But it doesn’t really matter. The chaps have buried the hatchet and the sense of enjoyment in playing this (wholly original) music again was palpable. I joked (I think…) with Ali after the show that they should book an evening soon JUST to have a row, to get it out of the way before the next gig…

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