As far as I’m concerned, he can pay for his ticket and sit where he can find a seat. There are too many people who toady around Van and speak of him in awe. He’s just a man in a hat.

Everyone is aware that Van is bound to come along at some point… Two or three years back he turned up at a weekly jazz night Linley was running at McHugh’s Bar’s basement in Belfast. I think he’d arranged in […]

Cormac is indeed working towards some kind of paid-per-view sort of thing. It’s all beyond me, really, and even as a consumer it’s not a world I’m in, but finding some way to monetise that aspect of things is […]

Thanks both! I think Cormac will post a couple of his six-camera film clips online early next week, which I’ll stick here – they’ll give a better impression of things. Onwards! 🙂

One or two of my friends are becoming ‘Covid deniers’. It’s not a subject I want to start conversations with them about. I take it seriously. But the messaging – locally, nationally – has become confused. Three […]

Actually no, an Alliance Party fellow. But it doesn’t matter – Mark Simpson (the reporter in question)/BBC News just had to find somebody in politics to support Van’s stance and somebody in politics to criticise […]

And if a short sampler is needed, here’s the wonderful and little-known Chris Thompson with ‘London Blues’:

As usual, the URL didn’t post… Here it is:

Well, given that NI has few ‘celebrities’, Van getting involved in topical matters got him a 4 or 5 minute report on the NI regional BBC news prog yesterday – with a couple of local politicians giving (of course) […]

Doubling down (by Avalon)

New definition just in from the OED:

‘Vandemic’ – a plague of ill-informed opinions associated with Celtic soul purveyors about international health emergencies; usually expressed with rancour and digressions […]

Magnificent! 😀

Very good!

There are elements of what he does that I really like – bits of his playing, some of his songs, his ability to hold a crowd when totally solo… yet the whole thing, for me, just doesn’t add up to something I want […]

Not really… but then again, I find myself drawn to some more than others… so I’m not sure if that answers your question!

There’ll be a 6CD Bert Jansch BBC set to look forward to next year 🙂

They do seem to resemble Flanagan & Allen in that newspaper photo, though.