I just brought a couple of songs to this afternoon’s sing around (as well as the double bass).

To kick off, I tried In a Broken Dream by Python Lee Jackson. The original was released in 1972 and had vocals by Rod Stewart. My version didn’t do quite so well on the vocals – I thought I’d got the key sorted at the home but the difference between practising in a small room and a large room caught me again even though I’d been working on it at quite a high volume at home in the morning. Still, I made it through in a soulful fashion, even if I had to wrestle with one or two of the notes.

For my second song, I went for a traditional drinking song, Ye Mariners All (or A Drop of This). Well warmed up by this point, I concentrated on carrying the tune and let the bass part flow freely in support of that. I also did a short Ogden Nash poem at the very end of the session to help close things off: “A cow is of the bovine ilk / One end moo, the other milk.”