This is exciting! Subject to the continued lifting of Covid restrictions, we will be playing these Thursdays at The Snickleway Inn on Goodramgate in York: 

Thursday 22 July

Thursday 19 August

Thursday 16 Sept

Thursday 21 Oct

Thursday 18 Nov

Thursday 23 Dec

Rehearsals are going well and we’ve got a clutch of new tunes and a song or two all ready to go! We’re just waiting for the venues to reopen, and for an appointment at the hairdressers…

We made another of those home videos – this is a set of tunes we first heard at Celtic Connections in Glasgow, played by Vishten, a fantastic trio from Prince Edward Island in French-speaking Canada.

Many thanks to Angela for putting together the video and to Jack for mixing the sound – all recorded on iPhones at home in York.

Not long until we’ll be rehearsing together again – a new era begins!

We’ve been accumulating a pile of tunes to try out, as soon as we can get together again. And in the meantime, we’ve forgotten how to play half the old tunes. One of the bandwives posted a video of us playing a Peatbogs set in the Snick and I had to sit still and listen because I couldn’t remember any of it. So, two priorities: get all the old tunes back under our fingers and sort out a load of new ones!

Here’s a video we made during lockdown#2, just to remind ourselves how one of the big sets go. It’s surprisingly difficult to stay together when you’re playing along on your own with just a pair of earphones!

This is The Superfly Set by The Treacherous Orchestra – one of our all-time favourite bands!

The three tunes are:

• Sheepskins and Beeswax – a trad tune that’s thought to have made its way from Co. Wexford to Quebec then back again. The title is a reference to a plaster, placed on an injury, that’s almost impossible to get back off.

• Taybank Shenanigans by the TO’s piper and whistle player Ross Ainslie. According to The Session website, it’s named after the pub in Dunkeld.

• Superfly by Kevin O’Neill – the flautist of Treacherous Orchestra who is supposed to have played it at the sessions in the Ben Nevis in Glasgow – our favourite Glasgow pub!

Many thanks to Angela for editing the video and Jack for mixing the sound – all recorded on a variety of iPhones in houses around York. A special mention to Billy for the disco lights!

It’s been six months since our last gig. Angie has been doing a lot of violin practice and Rach has learned a lot of 70’s TV Theme Tunes on the accordion. Jack’s recorded his third solo album and has had tracks from it played on BBC 6 Music – he was recently interviewed on BBC Radio York – he is Pascallion.

Early on, we wrote a new tune that you can find on YouTube – we posted it back in April.

Meanwhile, we’ve learned a couple of new sets by some of the Celtic greats and we’ve had a couple of socially distanced rehearsals.

We know we have a few fans in the USA and we were delighted to have a track from our CD Six played on a local radio station in West Virginia.

September is usually one of our busiest months but it looks like it will be weeks before we’re able to get back to gigging in person. So, keep safe and see you all – eventually!

This weekend we should have been celebrating Jack’s birthday at The Ben Nevis in Glasgow on our way to gigs in Fort William, Glencoe and on The Isle of Skye. We’re fortunate that we’re all home, safe and well.

While we’ve been home, we wrote a new tune and sent it round to the other band members. Around the same time, Angie revealed that she knows how to do those videos with lots of separate windows of people playing together (you know – the ones where one girl appears, singing all the parts…).

So, here’s the result!

In Ireland, the elderly and vulnerable are being “cocooned”, so that’s where the title comes from and this one’s dedicated to Frank Ekstrom, just outside Dundalk, cocooned with his dog Tojo.

We’ll do some more work on arranging this as soon as we’re able to get together, and we’ll gig it a few times to see if it works live.

All the best from Leather’o in the meantime – keep well and see you soon!

Like most musicians and performers, we are cancelling all our gigs for the foreseeable future. We have several in the diary later in the year, so hopefully the situation will be back to normal by then.

In the meantime, we’re thinking about doing some recording and working on some new tunes.

Please continue to support the professional musicians you love to listen to – their income will drop drastically, just as the festival season was about to start.

Keep well, do the right thing and see you all soon!