For today’s sing around (in the hall at All Saints Thorpe Acre with Dishley), I took two instruments – my banjo and my tuba.

I used the banjo for my opening and closing contributions. My first song was Spencer the Rover, a wonderful folk song in which [SPOILER ALERT] no-one dies and everyone ends up living happily ever after. Later on, as we were almost at a close, I also got out Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think). There are various lyrics out there, not all of which I’m keen on, but the one I picked up from my ukulele club in Oxford remains gently comic throughout.

The main reason for taking the tuba was to give a premiere performance of The Birth of Heavy Metal, a solo medley I’ve worked up as a party piece for a concert the Charnwood Training Band are putting on in September. From the primordial swamp of some oompah music and a generic boogie blues, I then touch on Sunshine of Your Love and Hey Joe (two much covered songs from the era where blues rock was getting louder and heavier) before finishing on Iron Man by Black Sabbath, an early tune from a band that is almost invariably mentioned in any history of heavy metal.

I don’t think that anyone noticed that I’d left out Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild, the first song I know of to mention heavy metal in the lyrics (although referring, I believe, to motorbikes). That was on the shortlist but got dropped for reasons of time. Why on tuba? As I’ve mentioned before, it is definitely a heavy, metal instrument…