Holly Head

Product Information

The album also comes with a brace of novelty numbers, first up finding her trail the gift wrap around the tuba parping silliness of the jaunty ‘Hippo For Christmas’, a Christmas hit from back in 1953 sung by 10-year-old Oklahoma City child star Gayla Peevey under the self-explanatory title ‘I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas’. This limited edition vinyl release is a double disc pressing on 180g heavyweight transluscent green vinyl with beautiful gatefold packaging. With the opening of the railway from London to Liverpool, Holyhead lost the London-Dublin mail contract in 1839 to the Port of Liverpool.

In the early nineteenth century, it was still undecided which port would be chosen as the primary sea link along the route from London to Dublin: Porthdinllaen, on the Llŷn Peninsula, or Holyhead in Anglesey. And there were a few of your inspirations on that album that you got to record with, not least local-ish, lad, Richard Hawley. I did a bit of music, some dancing, and technical – my dad was a sound engineer – so thought, ‘I’ll have a go at that. Wanderings in North Wales: A Road and Railway Guide-book : Comprising Curious and Interesting Historical Information with a Description of the Ancient Castles and Ruins of the Northern Principality, Its Churches, Towns, Mountains, Rivers, Lakes, Railways, Etc. A People's History of Slade (Spenwood Books, 2023) and This Day in Music's Guide to The Clash (This Day in Music, 2018), currently writing, editing and collating Solid Bond in Your Heart: A People's History of The Jam (Spenwood Books, 2024).Disc 2: 1 - While Shepherds Watched, 2 - The Mistletoe Bough, 3 - Bleak Midwinter (Yorkshire), 4 - Celestial Hearts, 5 - I Am Christmas, 6 - B. I’ve still got numbers for him and his manager, but … It was such a privilege to have a peer into that kind of world though. Born into a family of musicians in 1973 in Penistone, in Yorkshire’s West Riding, learning to sing, play guitar, fiddle and piano from a young age, Kate was already playing local folk festivals before a spell as lead vocalist of all-female Celtic folk band The Poozies.

The legend has been ascribed to several different counties, but the song settles on Lovell Hall in Oxfordshire. So it all just kind of fitted, and hopefully nobody got muddled up and listened to me instead of Adele! And it just went like that – every gig I was doing, somebody else would say, ’Do you fancy doing a slot at our folk club? I still see her every now and again, bumping into her at a festival up in the lakes recently, had a right good chinwag, catching up. Proud of his two grown-up daughters, now fostering with his long-suffering partner, wondering where the hours go as he walks his beloved rescue lab-cross Millie, spending any spare time catching up with family and friends, supporting Woking FC, and planning the next big move to Cornwall.I had a list of 200 songs in the first instance, possibilities, but wanted to make sure we had ideas for the songs we ultimately chose, to make them a little, make them our own, but hopefully not upset the people who wrote or performed them, or the people that love listening to the original versions. For more than 200 years, from late-November to New Year’s Day, North Derbyshire and South Yorkshire communities would congregate on Sunday lunchtimes to belt out their takes on familiar carols, some frowned upon by the church in Victorian times as ‘too happy’. Tickets are going well for this tour, not least selling out the Union Chapel in North London, among the dates rolled over from last year when Damien and another bandmate followed Kate’s lead and caught Covid, both having avoided the dreaded virus until then. As is the case with many coastal parts of Wales, the name in English is significantly different from its name in Welsh. There’s only three traditional carols proper, the first arriving with ‘Yorkshire Three Ships’, which is, of course, ‘I Saw Three Ships’, here merrily lolloping down the street to a circling guitar pattern as the instrumentation gradually builds, complemented by the cascading notes of a gently lullabying five-minute ‘Bleak Mid-Winter (Yorkshire)’, Christina Russell’s words set to music by Gustav Holst, the number gradually swelling with the arrival of the warming brass, and a fingerpicked minstrel-like ‘While Shepherds Watched’ (her sixth different version).

A similar period atmosphere (with almost a Slavic air) enfolds the traditional, echoey-sung, ‘Lu Lay’, better known as either ‘The Wexford Carol’ or ‘The Coventry Carol’, while ‘Celestial Hearts’ (“ We’ll tune our hearts and raise our voice”) is a Yorkshire variant (Worrall and Oughtibridge to be exact) of ‘New Celestial’, sparklingly arranged by Rusby and O’Kane. Yes, we have mutual friends in and around Sheffield, and he’s asked me to do a thing he does at Christmas in Sheffield every year, featuring three or four bands. I’ve played that for years and really love going back, and we’re doing an ‘and friends’ gig at the end of this 30 celebration, so there will be lots of people playing with us, including Jason Manford. Between the energy and life not just by the music itself, but the people playing it being so engrained into the songs themselves, Talisk has become a foot-stomper, and an absolute jam of a band to put on full volume. Local bus services are provided primarily by Arriva Buses Wales, who operate services around Anglesey and to Bangor.

Also, we’ve been doing that tour for, I don’t know, 17/18 years, something like that, and we’ve done five Christmas albums to date, but there are still so many songs to go over. He’s a bit younger, and I’d already been doing some solo stuff, then ended up getting together with Kathryn, doing duo gigs. Prior to the influence of the fort on the name, the hamlets which came before it were likely known as Llan y Gwyddel ('church/parish of the Irish') and Eglwys y Beddi ('church of the graves').

I think this time around, when the girls go back to school in January, we’ll carry on with the new Christmas album we’re working on. So, 11 of us altogether on stage, and six crew, I think, and of course not forgetting Ruby Reindeer! When I was growing up, I remember GCSE and A-level time, everybody seeming to know what they were going to do. Based in Lancashire since 1994, after a free transfer from Surrey following five years of 500-mile round-trips on the back of a Turkish holiday romance in 1989.Holyhead is on Holy Island, bounded by the Irish Sea to the north, and is separated from Anglesey island by the narrow Cymyran Strait and was originally connected to Anglesey via the Four Mile Bridge. Holyhead ( / ˈ h ə ʊ l i ˈ h ɛ d/, / ˌ h ɒ l i ˈ h ɛ d/; [3] [4] Welsh: Caergybi [kɑːɨrˈɡəbi], " Cybi's fort") is the largest town and a community in the county of Isle of Anglesey, Wales, with a population of 13,659 at the 2011 census. Whether you're looking for your favourite band's new vinyl release, or a classic album rereleased on vinyl - you'll find what you need in our categories. But I went along and did it, played for about half an hour, was nearly sick with fear, came off and went, ‘I’m never doing this again. All image and audio content is used by permission of the copyright holders or their agents, and/or according to fair dealing as per the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.