Brad Spurgeon's Blog

No Internet at home for nearly a week, but I’m sitting on the Emirates A380 on my way to Dubai en route to India, and I have an Internet connection…. The world turned upside down – as it were. With a horrendously busy week ahead of me in India, followed by another week – or almost – in Abu Dhabi, I wanted to get a few words down on my badly neglected blog about happenings. The most important, urgent thing to write about is David Broad and his CD and concert in Paris over the weekend.

I wrote about David Broad, the finger-picking virtuoso from Leeds – of all places – when I was in Mokpo, South Korea, of all places, sick as a dog ready to be eaten. I realized a few days after writing that post that I had not done any justice to the subject of it whatsoever. Nowhere in my post about David’s amazing CD and musicianship and skill, etc., did I point out that all but three of the songs on the CD were written by Broad himself.

The reason for that oversight is because I thought that the songs were all old standards of blues, folk, old time stuff. Reading over the CD carefully upon re-listening to it while doing my exercises after returning to Paris from dogland, I realized that David had written all but three of the songs and they were insanely good. I had heard several of them before, and the one, Congress Street, I was certain was an old standard.

Nope, Broad’s broad material.

Anyway, so I went to hear him in his gig at the Zelda bar in Paris on Saturday night, and I apologized to him about not doing justice on that thing I wrote – which he had not even noticed! A very low-key man. The concert at Zelda’s was superb, with just Broad and his guitar. He held the audience electrified for more than an hour.

It also turned out that the bar, Zelda, was run by an old friend, from the band Rock&Roll, a short lived but relatively successful band from the bubble of baby rockers that came out of Paris in the middle of the last decade. Check out the Zelda bar….

On Monday, last night, I returned to two of my favorite open mics, the Coolin and the Galway, and I played at each one, but did not take out my recording device all that much, and in any case, I may have an internet connection here on the A380 above Turkey or wherever I am at the moment, but if I were to upload a single video I get the feeling it would take the rest of the flight – and certainly my allowance in terms of Internet bytes…or is it bits…?

Suffice it to say that Coolin was as fun as ever, if a little late in starting – which helped me check out the Galway first….