Ken Langsbury & Bernie Cherry + Goblin Band

Ken Langsbury and Bernie Cherry are playing Alder Bar on Sunday 13 December, with Goblin Band joining them for the night. The venue is in the Albyn Complex on Percy Street in Neepsend, and the whole thing is put on by The New Musical Traditions Club.

Langsbury and Cherry have been friends and collaborators for over 50 years, and their singing comes from long, distinct traditions. Langsbury has sung all his life, drawing on songs from his childhood and his time with the King's Dragoon Guards in Malaya; he was a member of the harmony group The Songwainers, a fool for Old Spot Morris, and remains a fine storyteller. Cherry, born near Rochester in Kent, has been singing since 1966, mostly English traditional songs; he was an early member of the Old Swan Band and a founding foreman of Old Spot Morris. Between them, that's a lot of English traditional singing and a fair bit of Morris history.

Goblin Band are a London-based four-piece English trad/folk band. They work with harmony singing and a wide range of instruments — fiddle and squeezebox alongside hurdy-gurdy and recorders — and they describe their sound as an unruly alternative expression of English traditional music. The band grew out of sessions run from the Hobgoblin Music shop in central London, organised by a group of young queer folk enthusiasts and shop employees, and they root their work in a socialist tradition concerned with folk's relationship to the history of the working classes, capitalism and colonialism.

Doors open at 7:30pm and the music starts at 8:00pm. General admission is £16.00, with a £1.60 booking fee on top.