Jimmy Aldridge and Sid Goldsmith

 The New Room

Jimmy Aldridge and Sid Goldsmith are playing, it may not entirely surprise you to learn, in a church: the New Room on Broadmead: allegedly, the oldest Wesleyan chapel in the world. I am not sure if it still has a regular weekly church community, but is certainly Methodist. There is a cafe selling tea, coffee and cake which you can take into the church, and a temporary bar selling bottles of beer which you quite definitely can't.  When I was a kid, my branch of the Boys Brigade volunteered to weed the church yard of Wesley's chapel in London. They gave us a new bugle to say thank you. We were told that was the oldest Wesleyan chapel in the world. I feel somehow cheated. 

Sam Sweeny played the New Room just before lock down: Jimmy and Sid were supposed to play there the following week. It is now eighteen months later and Sid has shaved his beard off, but the gig is finally going ahead. All the regular Bristol folkies are in attendance. There is a proper pulpit and the sort of acoustic in which a thousand tongues would be only to happy to sing. Sid and Jimmy say they have amended their set to take advantage of the vibe. 

They are probably the single folkiest duo I know. They write a lot of their own material, but their own material sounds traditional. They spot things in the real world which seem to require folk songs and supply the. When Jimmy was working in London he noticed that there was a nocturnal class of workers who reset offices and shops for the day staff, and wrote the haunting Night Hours about them. (It is not called night owls, though some people think it is.) When it rained a lot during his new-year stay in a small hostel in the woods, he wrote a song about that. They heard the state-of-the-nation tale about a zero ours Sports Direct outlet build on the site of a former unionized coal-mine and wrote a song about that. 

They do the Chemical Workers Song ('they'll time your every breath') but resist any temptation to bellow it. They tell the audience to sing along, but we mainly don't: it somehow wouldn't seem quite proper. Jimmy is descended from Romany family on his mother's side: he sings the remarkable Reed Cutter's Daughter, about a gypsy who falls in love with a settled woman but can't give up the road to marry her. Sid is a soil scientist; they sing the Harvest Gypsies, Kris Dreever's remarkable song about Steinbeck era migrants ("to miss the soil's a curious pain"). 

There is something of the Simon and Garfunkle in the collaboration: they don't so much harmonize as create a hybrid, gestalt voice greater than the sum of its parts. They repurpose the gospel number Hand on the Plough so its more directly about the environment. Agricgospel, they call it. The like religious music, because what could be better than someone singing about their own deeply held spirituality, although they describe themselves as being non-denomination. The evening ends with a not entirely un hymn like Copper Family number ("thousands or more".) Methodism was born in song, allegedly, and the man on the horse outside might not have entirely disapproved.