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Can this be it?
"The smallest show on earth"
This tiny village hall attracts some of
the world's top musicians.
Chris Arnot visits The Shed in Brawby to find out why
We drove a long way to see Tom
Robinson unplugged. Was it two, four, six or eight motorways?
More like three, plus a hell of a lot of narrow, twisting lanes
in search of one of Britain's most unlikely music venues.
Brawby Village Hall, 22ft by
26ft of Yorkshire stone, is home to the local branch of the Women's
Institute and stages occasional whist drives for the sparse population
in the gently undulating Vale of Pickering. An odd place, then,
to find a gig by the leading songwriter of the punk generation,
a man with 20 albums and several chart hits to his name, and
who has played Madison Square Garden in New York. Right now,
we're closer to old York, and even that's 30 miles down the road.
This is Robinson's second visit.
The first time, it took him an eternity to find the place and,
when he finally did, he took one look at the hall and said: "This
can't be it." That's what they all say at first, the artists
who trek up from London or even jet over the Atlantic at the
behest of Simon Thackray,
the unlikely impresario of Brawby.
Thackray, a painter and sculptor,
has spent all his 40 years here and has no intention of leaving.
Why should he? With a bit of financial help from Yorkshire Arts
and Ryedale District Council, he has managed to bestow on an
isolated village in North Yorkshire the sort of cultural profile
that some medium-sized cities might envy.
For every gig, he transforms
the hall into an intimate club. Little more than 70 customers
can wedge in, but rows of seats are broken up with tables topped
by candles and bowls of pistachio nuts. There's a little bar
where you can buy wine, bottles of Stella Artois or pints of
Double Chance bitter, brewed in nearby Malton. On the stage set
behind every performer hangs the warped wood and rusted hinges
of Thackray's shed door.
The venue is marketed as The Shed.
It all started with a fund-raising
event for the local church in 1992. Through a viola-playing friend,
he managed to secure a string quartet from Manchester's Halle
Orchestra and, through Labi Siffre's agent, he booked a cora
(African lute) player from Gambia. "I really wanted Labi
himself because I'd just seen him in Leeds," he says, "But
I had to wait another six months to get him. Once he found us,
he seemed to like the place and recommended other musicians I
might want to book. From that, it just grew organically."
And word spread. Last year, a
German couple flew from Munich to Manchester, hired a car and
drove to Brawby to see the soul singer Jackie Leven. Billie Holliday's
pianist, Mal Waldron, came all the way from America to perform
here, and an American woman flew in from Dublin to catch one
of Hank Wangford's appearances.
"Hank's almost become one
of the family," says Thackray. The same could be said of
Snake Davis, saxophonist with the Eurythmics and M People.
Every June, he provides backing
for the words of poet and Radio 4 presenter Ian McMillan at the
Yorkshire Pudding Boat
Race for children which is staged on a pond in Brawby.
The Moors themselves are just
a short drive away. Or you could go into Pickering and pick up
the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, or take a run out to the coast.
Scarborough, Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay are close at hand. Closer
still is Malton, where on a Saturday the farmers' market spills
across the sloping square at the top of Saville Street and the
racing is on the telly in the bustling front bar of Suddaby's
Crown Hotel, an evocative 1970s time warp of a pub on Wheelgate,
which brews its own beer.
Indeed, much of Malton seems
to be in a bit of a time warp, and none the worse for that. This
is how English small towns used to be before so many were drained
of life by vast superstores squatting just outside their boundaries.
Yes, Malton has its chain stores, its Mexican restaurant, its
pizzeria and its café-cum-bookshop offering celery and
cashew-nut soup and shepherd's pie with "organic" mince.
But it also has shops that you rarely find elsewhere. A ropemaker,
for instance, and a "designer blacksmith".
Best of all is Yates's on Railway
Street, a vast emporium established in 1895 and still run by
the same family. "During the floods," one of them told
me, "we sold 1,000 pairs of wellies in a week. It takes
some doing does that."
Elsewhere in Yates's, you can
buy anything from a washing machine to clout nails. Pushbikes
dangle from the ceiling. Agricultural implements line the upper
walls and, above the general hubbub, you can hear canaries and
budgies chirping from a large cage near the stairs.
Now that's what I call a superstore.
© Chris Arnot
Way to go
PLEASE NOTE: The Shed gigs are now in Hovingham,
not Brawby.
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