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!

31 December: Tonight we hold the band’s annual award ceremony, the Golden Beast Awards, named after the two golden retrievers and the ginger cat who follow us around. As we contemplate the high and low lights of 2019, who better to share them with but our small but perfectly-formed fan base?

We were pretty pleased with the Acid Croft rave we created at York’s Mindfest on Parliament Street in September.

Who could forget the many, frankly scary, gigs at the Irish bar in Scarborough, best summed up by Angie when she exclaimed, mid-gig, ‘…what do you have to do to get thrown out of this pub?’ 

Best audience has to go to The East Riding Theatre in Beverley – thanks to Phil Simpson for putting us on. Most persevering audience goes to the regulars who come and see us in Scarborough. They sit very still while the stag and hen do’s kick off around them and we take shelter with them in the break.

Most mud goes to Greenside Festival in the Dales (to be fair, it wasn’t a very muddy year).

Toughest journey was probably driving two hours through the fog to a gig at the Tan Hill Inn in the Yorkshire Dales.

We clocked up a few more festivals this year (Can you hear us Shrewsbury… Cambridge? We’re up here, waiting to hear from you…).

We sold the final few copies of our CD ‘Six’ and together with the streaming fees we can treat ourselves to a packet of crisps with the proceeds. Yay!

This year has also stood out for the number of new tunes and songs we’ve introduced to the set (someone in the band clearly has time on his hands…) and we’ve got quite a few new ones already in rehearsal for next year.

Thanks to everyone who came to see us, and to the promoters and pub managers who booked us in 2019. Thanks as always to Graham, landlord at The Snickleway – the best pub in York, and thanks also to Bob Mitchell for all the fantastic photos he takes of the band!

We have nearly 30 gigs in the diary for 2020, from the Scottish Highlands in the North to the Lake District in the West and Wiltshire in the South, plus our regular gigs in York and on the East Coast. Happy New Year – see you there!

The year is drawing to a close with the last couple of Leather’o gigs, both at our favourite York pub, The Snickleway Inn on Goodramgate. The perfect way to end a great year!

The band’s members are busy through December, touring with other bands, travelling and attending to some family stuff – all very good!

We’ve posted our initial gig list for 2020 and we’re gathering nominations for our annual awards – a private affair, acknowledging the best (and sometimes the worst) of the year – best gig, best audience, best new tune…

We’re very excited about our plans for next year, which already include gigs in Scotland and the Lake District, and a trip south for a showcase gig in Wiltshire. Hurrah!

York Mind is putting live music on throughout the York Food Festival and what a great crowd they brought in to see us! We were brought back on stage for two encores, they danced like crazy and what a noise they made!!

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Many thanks once again to Bob Mitchell for his wonderful photography!

We’re back from our summer break and our first gig was a great set at the lovely Greenside Festival in The Yorkshire Dales – just look at that moon and that bonfire!

Leather’o has a full diary of gigs going into the autumn (well, maybe room for one or two more…). They will all be in the Forthcoming Gigs sidebar on this website and will be on Facebook nearer the time – see you there!

The festival season is upon us and we’re delighted to be playing at the Folk Festivals in Filey, Cleethorpes, Goodmanham and The City of York Folk Festival at The Black Swan. Later this year we will be playing in York’s Rowntree Park, at the Greenside Festival in The Dales and the Langdale Folk Weekend in the Lake District.

We’ve been working on some new tunes! Over the past few gigs we’ve been introducing several big, exciting sets from the new tradition, two from Scotland and our first French Canadian set.

We’re also working on a couple of new tunes of our own in the Celtic tradition – they’ll be ready soon. 

So, with all those new tunes, it’s time to find some new songs too, and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing – we’ll have two new songs in the set later this month, both about sex and death, like they always are…