Description
The crucial first album by the legendary Scots band The Easy Club fusing Scots folk with jazz, swing, and rhythms from everywhere was years ahead of it's time. The Easy Club remains unsurpassed in their musicianship and inventiveness.
Any fan interested in the swinging percussive possibilities of Celtic music should own this album. Irish Music Magazine.
The Easy Club Reel; Dirty Old Town; The innocent Railway; The Auld Toon Shuffle; The Arnish Light; The Train Journey North; The Midlothian Mining Song; The Radical Road; Fause, fause hae ye been; Ms. Lyall.
Originally released on vinyl in 1984 and unavailable for many years, The Easy Club is finally out on CD, digitally re-mastered from the original tapes, and reproducing the original sleeve art. The musical adventures of The Easy Club, fusing Scots folk and jazz, swing, and rhythms from everywhere, were years ahead of their time, and with a superb lineup of JACK EVANS (guitar), JOHN MARTIN (fiddle), ROD PATERSON (vocals & guitar) and JIM SUTHERLAND (cittern, bodhran & percussion), The Easy Club remain unsurpassed in their musicianship and their inventiveness.
The Easy Club's first album was recorded over the Summer of 1984 at the newly-opened Pier House Studios in Granton, Edinburgh, by Peter Haigh. The Band had formed out of sessions in Edinburgh's infamous folk pub Sandy Bell's Bar and developed its uniquely swingy sound, helped by custom-built guitars and citterns by Stefan Sobell, superb bodhrans by Dave Gormlie, plus the odd eccentricity like John Martin's phono fiddle. The album was recorded using only acoustic instruments, but full use was made of studio techniques and effects that were available at that time. The Easy Club released this album on their own label, Abbeyhill Music, and subsequently went on to release two more albums.
Although The Easy Club ceased touring around 1988, the Band never actually broke up, and its members have continued to work together, in other bands and on a variety of projects, to the present day.
'The Easy Club' was originally a drinking club in Edinburgh's High Street. It's most famous member was the poet Allan Ramsay, whose work inspired both Fergusson and Burns. 'The Easy Club' was banned by the new British Government in 1715 because of its opposition to the union of Scotland and England.