Salut! Live

Bryan Ledgard's picture of Pentangle at 2007 BBC Folk Awards

Choosing music to make physical exercise more bearable can be a challenge. It has to be good to have any chance of working, but the last thing you want is for the accompanying exertion to put you off it for life.

In days when I’d spend half an hour in the office gym before starting work,  I found the only album that would see me through an activity I loathed was the  eponymous John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers

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Following a minor op, I had to choose again, to go with daily sequences designed to acquaint my body with what had happened to it and strengthen the muscles.  

Jacqui McShee - I found a. better photograph offered by Vintage Photos at Amazon but was unsure of copyright  - would understand. We are both of an age when such medical issues crop up.

fRoots can be found online at frootsmag.com

By nature, I am a hoarder. I have files, newspapers and magazines going back decades. My wife is the opposite and when the need came to clear out the garage, there would be only one winner.

A slice of contemporary French history had already gone to the déchetterie - OK, the council tip - and been dumped in the oversized paper waste bins.

Forgive me for being late with this but, come to think of it, the timing is right.

On French news this lunchtime, amid generous and impressive coverage of commemorations on the 75th anniversary of D-Day, this song popped up. I realise the story may well be old news for some.

Some years ago, I acclaimed the first album from Bill Jones - sorry to be namist about this but she signs messages with the much more appealing Belinda - and later criticised another.

I have felt rotten about it ever since; it was an honest judgement in each case but perhaps reviewers who actually like the art form they are considering should generally be happiest when able to praise, though it would be fair to wonder how many are. Now comes another album and I fell in love with it on first hearing.

Bill/Belinda and I have never met but we get along quite well electronically. Though she hails from Staffordshire, she has lived in Sunderland for most of her adult life - in itself a plus in my eyes, though I grew up 20 miles away - and has three sons, of whom one, (Dom) is, as he should be, Sunderland AFC-mad. Like me, he will be at Wembley for the League One playoff final on Sunday (May 26), when I should really be in France and he should be at his mum's gig in Chippenham.

Salut! Live is proud to have brought a discerning if usually quite small audience a treasure chest of excellent music over the 10 years or so of its existence. I wish it could be more active but other commitments get in the way and the refusal of newsnow.co.uk to list the site dampened enthusiasm considerably during 2018 (had they done so, readership would have risen to levels that might make the effort feel worthwhile).

But I shall continue to update Salut! Live as often as I can and am delighted today to wish those regular readers I have, and any others who stray into its pages, a very happy Christmas and a wonderful new year.

I had not intended to re-open the debate on Beeswing. But it is possibly my favourite song - a choice that changes from time to time - and this comment might otherwise be lost in the undiscovered, though eminently discoverable, archives of Salut! Live.

More importantly, the version I reproduce above is from a wonderful figure of the British folk world who has just died, Roy Bailey (see my report on his death).

I noted with surprise today that I have not mentioned the late Jackson C Frank's gripping song, The Blues Run the Game, for three years (plus three days).

But yesterday, screening room number five at Picturehouse Central just off Piccadilly Circus resonated with the spellbinding mix of voice, guitar picking and song that makes this one of my all-time favourites. So why not share another listen?

The reason for my pleasant surprise at the cinema - actually one of two; I enjoyed A Star is Born much more than I'd expected to - is a dominant part of the trailer for Robert Redford's new film, The Old Man & A Gun, about the San Quentin jailbreaker Forrest Tucker. That suggests a great soundtrack. The film looks half-decent, too.

Who didn't smile at the story of the Dutch man who, at 69, is asking a court to grant his request to "identify" as a 45-year old so he can have more success with online dating?

The subject of this posting is also past 60 but has no problem with his age being known. And after several years of "identifying" as Jake, or occasionally Jake Lark, he has come out. Jake is John Clark, one of three members of the band Murder Valley, based in the Spanish city of Leon.

Until now, I have been calling John Jake when crediting him for the graphical images he produces so prolifically for my football site, Salut! Sunderland .