News and Views - Local and International
Sunday 19th May at the Bulls Head, Barnes will be Wolfgang Gutscher's last gig with the band prior to his move back to Germany. Jon Riley has accepted our offer for him to take over as bass player. So, the May 19th gig is going to be really special with BOTH of them playing! Both are excellent multi-instrumentalists so there will be some fireworks at this very unusual event! Wolf has written a "Farewell Blues", which he will sing, will do some ragtime guitar and some time during the afternoon will play (probably!) his last blow on a whisky jug for quite a while. Jon will be adding some mandolin and possibly lead guitar and banjo - who knows what might happen!

And we have two band birthdays to celebrate - Mike's and Gary's.

So it's both a sad and happy occasion - that's the Blues!
Anyway, it'll be a party atmoshere, so don't miss it!

Eve-Aid

Mike's brother Paul Gilbert put on a special benefit gig on Sunday 21st, April in aid of his daughter, Eve, who was born 8 months ago with Charge Association Syndrome.

Please click the above image to go to a page describing Eve's problems. Even if you couldn't make it to the benefit gig, he would still appreciate donations, as the family can not afford the equipment they could positively use to improve Eve's life. All details on that page.
Komina Nakasawa, one of Mike's ex-Web Design Diploma students at Cavendish College, has provided us with a Japanese flag blurb - I hope it says nice things! I believe it does. Thank you very much Komina and good luck in your career! She did the text in broken apart mode in Flash to save me the bother and make sure the Kanji showed correctly. Brilliant and lots of thanks! (She was top student 2001 and knows some stuff! - including VBScript, ActionScript, Flash, Swish, asp and MS Access and more....). Talk to her! Her name is an e-mail link.
Many thanks to Dave Meaden of the Usual Suspects band for depping on bass at the Bulls Head on Sunday, 14th April. Excellent playing and got us out of an awkward problem with Wolfgang being stuck in Germany that day.
Jon Riley played the bass for us at the Farnham Maltings as Wolfgang was in Germany that week. Jon is an expert musician and plays many instruments - we are very glad that he could help - he played a mean mandolin on the acoustic numbers, too! He has been in many blues and jazz bands and has led a number of bands himself over the years. He can boogie with the best of them and did a fantastic job. Real powerhouse on the bass - excellent. Many thanks.

The Farnham Maltings gig on April 4th will hopefully lead to some more stuff - we are talking to the agent who was interested in taking us further. More later.
A new, much extended Links page is now up - Mike has made a lot of contacts with Blues people around the world recently and will be reciprocating links to some really interesting sites. We've added a direct Links button on the navbar for people just passing through!. If you want to link up, go to the Contact page. The links page will be regularly extended.

Many thanks to Solveig Dahlberg (Swedish), Danielle Collberg (French), Wolfgang (German) and Georges de Graef (Belgian Flemish & French and Dutch) for the European language translations and original text, especially the local jokes, in the flag messages! Also, thanks to Jan van Gastel, the Dutch harmonica player, for his help, too. Check out his site.
Richard Carboni has just done some new photos at one of our practice sessions - they're on the FAQ page. More soon. He just loves his Minolta Dimage 7!
Found out recently that the "Stampen" Club web site in Stockholm has some pictures up of Mike playing there last year at the famous Saturday Blues Jam. If you fancy checking them out, have a look by clicking the picture links below. Thanks to Solveig Dahlberg in Östertälje, Sweden, for telling us about this. It's the only place Mike has been applauded after singing just one verse - mmm, mmm, mmm! The Swedes have a great Blues scene going, although the Stockholm Blues Society has had trouble with its venue over the last year or so. The Stampen Jam session is run by an American bottleneck man called Brian Kramer - he has a busy blues site in English and Swedish. If you're going to Sweden take a look.
Stampen1Stampen2

We got a bit of a change coming up later this year as Wolf is due to go back to Germany to live and set up his guitar-making business in beautiful Langenburg, Schwabia - he's fed up with London (and who can blame him!). Besides his great bass playing, he has also played some amazing ragtime and bottleneck blues with us and is a wizard on the whisky jug! He's a fantastic guy and an expert guitarist, so come listen. His guitars are just amazing, too! There's a link to his guitar business on the "Musicians" page - click on the picture of Wolf to get to that.

He tells us he's staying a little longer as his wife, Suzanne, is having a baby. This is double good news - we wish them all the best with this new endeavour!

The picture above was on our index page for a while. It was made up by Richard Carboni from a Bulls Head shot and the River Thames background - thanks for that. Very appropriate!

That's all for now!

 

 
 
 
 
 

 

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