Bob Dylan & the Liverpool Kids

Here's a short - around 10 minutes - BBC documentary on the Liverpool kids who posed with Dylan while he was on the legendary 1966 tour.

"Dylan and Feinstein [the photographer] just seemed to have stumbled into what amounted to a kids' playground. They were all out in the streets because their parents were probably watching Everton in the Cup Final that day. It was such a clash of 1960s culture. The kids looked like Victorian street urchins and Dylan looked like a man from Mars with his loud shirt and wild hair - that's what fascinated me." Link to story.

You can find the photo in the booklet of the Live 1966: The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert CD. Dylan fan Chris Hockenhall tracked 9 of the 10 kids 40 tears later for the documentary.

Eddi Reader: Willie Stewart

A while back I posted a link to a very fine and very restrained video of Eddi Reader doing the Robert Burns song My Love is Like a Red Red Rose. Very nice stuff, but you sort of expected the members of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra to pop up from behind the rocks. This clip, however, is Eddi live in full throttle at a festival -- with back up musicians who are equally fine, including the amazing John McCusker on fiddle -- on a lively Burns song, Willie Stewart. Reader says one of her thoughts in doing Burns music (she's a Scot, as of course, he was, and she's done his work with orchestras and as well as in more informal settings) is to do it the way someone might might have sung the songs in a pub in the 18th century, and you just happened upon it.

Jigs at a session

Just a bit of the lively craic and lively music you might find at an Irish tune session, especially if your players happened to be some really top ones.
Robbie O'Connell, Mick Moloney, Dana Lyn, Brendan Callaghan, and Athena Tergis play a set of jigs at a benefit for St. Malachy’s School in Philadelphia. This clip is a bit over seven minutes long and the gig took place just a few days back.