Cheshire Life

On Friday I took advantage of a spare ticket to see The Family Mahone play at Northwich Folk Club in a 96-seat theatre hidden away on an estate not far from the town centre. As hilarious as Mark Radcliffe and his band were, nothing could beat the embarrassingly painful poetry of one of the support acts, two typical Guardian-reading folk beardies who went under the amusing-to-them name of Daphne. Whilst one of them played an impressive array of instruments including an Asian squeezebox and Galician bagpipes, the other read out some of the direst and unintentionally funny lyrics I'd ever heard. Their first song was a tribute to the singer's dog, Tess, which you'd give a 12-year-old two weeks' detention for writing, but the highlight was a poem set to music called "Heavy Head" that went something like

"It's 1587, the sun's spring rays bounce off the mayflies' wings as they dart across the open fields and the bees shuffle in their daily toil from flower to fragrant flower. Mary kneels at the axeman's block."

He then goes on to describe Mary's execution in graphic detail and talks about how to weigh your head by displacing water, (obviously bollocks because of the different density) whilst intoning "Heavy Head, Heavy Head" at the end of each verse in a poor impression of Ivor Cutler. Absolutely priceless. Even overshadowed the stray dog that kept walking on stage during The Mahones Set. I bet The Pistols wouldn't have made me laugh as much as I did and I saved myself £35 in the process.