Our three gigs in Scotland over Easter lived up to every expectation! We had great, appreciative audiences and some extraordinary feedback, including a couple of invitations to return and play again, soon. Here we are playing an afternoon session at Fyne Ales:

We also gigged several new tunes and found some time to work on a few more (including two great new songs Angela will be singing) that we’ll be bringing out in the summer.

A Leather’o tour isn’t complete without a spontaneous photo shoot on someone’s phone, so here we are in a wood up a Scottish mountain. We’ll have to photoshop the lads in because Jack wasn’t out of bed yet, and Callum’s still somewhere in Asia – he’ll be back on percussion next week.

The next few weeks will include gigs in Scarborough, York and the Lake District, and rehearsals for an exciting new development that we’ll be launching at the beginning of June!

We’ve added some more gigs to the diary, including our first at a great bar in Scarborough – have a look on our Forthcoming Gigs page for details.

We’re very excited that Jack will be back on mandolin for our gig at The Snickleway Inn in York on 6 April and Callum will be back on percussion at the end of this month!

Meanwhile we’re playing-in some new tunes for our gigs in Scotland and the Lake District this spring. Many thanks to Martin for this photo from an informal session in York this week:

We’ve been playing Scottish tunes for years now, so we’re piling all the instruments into the car (plus the dogs, the daughter and the big Scottish guy that Angie’s married to) and we’re off to Scotland for a few gigs this Easter!

The first will be on Good Friday at the legendary Clachaig Inn in Glencoe.

On Easter Sunday afternoon we’ll be playing in the Tap Room at Fyne Ales.

We’re bound to find ourselves in a few other pubs along the way, doing a bit of playing as we go.

Many thanks to Robert Mitchell for taking some great photos of the band at The Snickleway Inn.

Stop Press: It was a great festival and our young dep-guiatrist did an outstanding job !

The band are delighted to be playing at the International Women’s Day celebration in York on 4 March. All the performers will be women so Leather’o are very excited to have their young dep guitarist filling in for Bob!

OK, it was a good year! We’ve had a great run of gigs (the marketing department points to 43% growth with a very positive trend in the quality and mix…), and played in a lot of new parts of the country, including some informal sessions on the East Coast, three gigs in Hampshire/Wiltshire and a run of gigs in the Lake District. We’ve set our sights on something further afield in 2017.

In April Callum joined us on percussion for a gig at the York Bier Keller. He was brilliant so he’s part of the band now!  He and Jack our mandolin player have flown east for the winter, so we’re back to our core line-up of four for the next few months.

The band shared a farmhouse for a week in August, with a series of gigs. We didn’t manage to write any new tunes but we played some awesome card games, walked until all of us (and all the dogs) were covered in mud, and had a few beers at The Wasdale Head – definitely one of the best pubs in the country. The final gig of that week was an unplugged session at the lovely Newfield Inn where Angie’s daughter Scarlett joined us on guitar for quite a few tunes – not bad for 8 years old!

We played a couple of completely unplanned sessions, too – one in Edinburgh where we discovered Rachel can play double bass, and one at the Bluebell on Fossgate. Rach went up to the barman and asked if it would be OK for us to play and few tunes – he said yes, but only if we were any good – so we played!

We made at least one video – another is in post-production and might be up online by time you read this. Other highlights of the year included our appearance on Vale Radio and a slightly weird gig at The Tan Hill Inn, England’s highest pub.

In contrast, we played a recital at The Unitarian Chapel in York when our sister group Garland of Flutes had to pull out at the last minute.

Most years around Christmas we put on a gig with at least one other band and this year was outstanding – in December we played at Your Bike Shed in York, co-headlining with Stillhouse. The venue is beautiful and the evening was sold out. Stillhouse played a wonderful set and it was the most brilliant fun to get both bands up on stage at the end of the evening to play a couple of tunes together!

We have one final gig before the end of the year, on New Years’ Eve, then we’re off to dinner, where there’s bound to be a bit of an awards ceremony for the year.

So what’s next year looking like? We’ll be playing at the Black Swan Winter Folk Day in York at the end of January and every tune will be new. In the past few months we’ve added tunes by The Gloaming, John McCusker, The Chair and Shooglenifty to our set. And we’ve written a few new tunes of our own, too!

In the next few months we’ll be gigging in Knaresborough, Thirsk and Whitby as we try to build on our hometown gigs in York. We’re also booked for the Langdale Festival in the Lake District in May.

The band’s diary is already filling up, so see you in 2017!

Join us for our Christmas Bash at Your Bike Shed at the top of Micklegate in York from 7.30pm on Saturday 10 December. It’s a fabulous, quirky venue with lots of the original features dating from its early life as a fine townhouse.
We’re joined by the fabulous Stillhouse who are playing all over the UK , including London’s Southbank Centre as well as at next year’s Beverley Folk Festival.

Update: here’s what it looked like!

It will be a very special evening, so we will be filming several of the tunes. Get your Christmas season underway with Leather’o and Stillhouse!

Here’s a lovely photograph that turned up out of the blue from a wedding we played at a few months ago. There were four of us there – our mandolin player Jack was at another wedding in Ireland.

Many thanks to Zoe Toone for these beautiful photographs of the band on stage at York’s Little Festival last weekend!

So, Leather’o have been trying to avoid the “windswept, on a dry stone wall” cliché, but the photo-opp at The Tan Hill Inn was just too good to miss – it’s the highest pub in England and it was a beautiful day. We had a great gig there, a few surprises and a couple of good walks out along the Pennine Way.

We’ll be playing at The Snickleway Inn in York this Thursday, and the set will include a couple of new songs – the Led Zeppelin number seems to be going down particularly well!

Our next gig after that will be Jack’s send-off, as he’s going to Asia for a few months. We’ll cram all the mandolin solos into the set then probably get our drinking trousers on to raise a glass to his safe return.