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.

As the autumn approaches we’ve been out gig hunting for 2017. We’ll be returning to The Lake District next May and we’re looking into some gigs further afield in the new year.

Our first professional video is on its way! The audio is finished – we just need to finish the video editing and there’s a good chance it will (finally) be finished this month.

We’ve also put some new live recordings from an August gig on our LISTEN page.

We had a great time playing a series of gigs in the Lake District and we’re already planning our return in May 2017. You can see some home-video of us playing at The Hawkshead Brewery on our Watch page.

One of many highlights was Angela’s daughter playing three or four tunes with us at a brilliant pub session. You can see a few video clips of that night on our Facebook Page.

We came back to York to a couple of bank holiday gigs, including a recording for Vale Radio. That makes 7 Leather’o gigs in 11 days, so I think it’s time for a beer…

Oh, and over in The Western Lakes where we were based there are also fantastic beaches!

Three of us are doing a couple of gigs in Hampshire this weekend – I guess we have to resurrect the old name Little Leather’o that we haven’t used for a while. We’ll be joined by our fabulous dep fiddle player Maggy Lamb. Update: the two gigs went well:

Next we’re off to the Lake District for a week, including four gigs and hopefully a lot of work around the kitchen table on the new tunes and songs we’ve got in the pipeline.

We’ll be gigging a few new tunes for the first time at the Snickleway Inn in York this Thursday. How many depends on how the rehearsal goes tonight!