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North East Bylines
Home Culture Performance

The Black Velvet Band

Musings on The Black Velvet Band

Peter LathanbyPeter Lathan
10-01-2022 12:38 - Updated On 18-03-2022 16:41
in Performance, TV & Radio, UK
Reading Time: 3 mins
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Black velvet band

Drawing by Suzy Varty

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Memory does funny, even weird, things sometimes.

I woke up this morning…

That sounds like the beginning of a Blues number, doesn’t it?

“Well, I woke up this morning
Blues hangin’ round my head.
Yes, well, I woke up this morning
Blues hangin’ round my head.
Felt so awful, I might as well be dead.
Yeah.”

Sorry. I’m rambling. I get a bit like that sometimes. Age, you know.

Maybe that should be my Blues name: Rambling Pete Lathan, purveyor of Blues to the good folk of the North East!

Oh! Sorry again! Back to the matter in hand.

I woke up this morning, singing (in my head) The Black Velvet Band, a folk song found all over the UK. I, however, was singing The Dubliners’ version, Irish accent and all. The group first recorded it – so Wikipedia tells me – in 1967 but the song was a staple in the late 60s/early 70s when I, along with most of my friends, was a regular frequenter of a number of NE folk clubs.

That was a phase that passed and the song faded from my mind.

Then, in 1997 (thirty years later – spooky!), we were taking a show to Germany and some German friends took us to the Altstadt in Düsseldorf, to an Irish bar where there was live music and the (genuine Irish) band played The Black Velvet Band. Two of us – me and Paul Tague, a Scotsman who was Technical Director of the Customs House in South Shields – joined in lustily (to the total embarrassment of our Musical Director!).

Hey! That could be the start of a joke, couldn’t it?

An Englishman and a Scotsman go into an Irish bar… (Supply your own punchline)

Then, yet again, I forgot all about the song, only to wake up singing it this morning 25 years all but a couple of months later. But not only that, I looked online for the Dubliners’ recording and realised that my mind was recreating that performance exactly!

And that, my friends, is really weird, for half the time I can’t remember what I had for dinner yesterday!

Her eyes they shone like diamonds
I thought her the queen of the land
And her hair it hung over her shoulders
Tied up with a black velvet band.

Here’s a Dubliners’ recording of the song.

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Peter Lathan

Peter Lathan

Peter Lathan first appeared on stage in a school play at the age of 13 in 1956 when he played Marion in Sean O’Casey’s Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy. He first directed a play – Chekhov’s The Anniversary – in 1966. He has been involved in theatre ever since. He has taught Drama in schools, youth theatres and stage schools, whilst also running drama classes for recovering addicts and adults with severe learning disabilities. He has written more than 35 plays and directed over 70 from site-specific Shakespeare to touring pantos, from new writing to classic plays, from Theatre in Education to corporate productions. He is the author of It’s Behind You: The Story of Panto. He has been, variously, artistic director of theatre company KG Productions (2000 – 2016), chairman of the board of the Wearabout Theatre Company of Sunderland, and a Trustee of the Customs House in South Shields (9 years) and of No Limits Theatre Company, a professional company for adults with a learning disability In 2001 he founded the online British Theatre Guide which he edited for 11 years. He remains its North East editor.

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