Aberdeen Citadel
Saturday 9 January 2016 1-2pm
FRANK ROBB AND FRIENDS
Singer, songwriter Frank Robb is joined by Yvonne Morton (Vocals),
Bob Knight (Guitar and Vocals), Alan Walker (Guitar), Sandy Leggat (Fiddle)
and Spider MacKenzie (Harmonica) for a programme of acoustic music,
featuring folk, blues and original songs.
An evening with Frank Robb
Wednesday 2 December 2015
Aberdeen Folk Club - The Blue Lamp
Plus special guests
Yvonne Morton, Bob Knight, Sandy Tweddle,
Alan Walker and Spider Mackenzie
Original songs from the celebrated singer guitarist along with his
personal favourites from the world of country, folk and blues.
Concert 8.30pm, doors open 8pm
Tickets £10, concessions £8 from
The Blue Lamp or on the door.
An evening with Frank Robb
Wednesday 10th December 2014
Aberdeen Folk Club - The Blue Lamp
Plus special guests
Yvonne Morton, Bob Knight, Sandy Leggat,
Alan Walker and Spider Mackenzie
Original songs from the celebrated singer guitarist along with his
personal favourites from the world of country, folk and blues.
Concert 8.30pm, doors open 8pm
tickets £10, concessions £8 from
The Blue Lamp or on the door.
Frank Robb and Friends
Saturday 4th January 2014
Lunchbreak Concert at Cowdray Hall
The second half of this season’s Lunchbreak Concerts opened with a very special
Saturday event - the perfect postlude to 2014’s New Year Celebrations. Aberdeen’s
very own star singer/songwriter Frank Robb had brought his own group of friends and
fellow performers to the Cowdray Hall for a concert which had no difficulty in
packing the Hall to capacity. While a few of the Lunchbreak’s “usual suspects”
including myself were in attendance, many of those in the hall were new faces. By
extending the concert repertoire to include music connected to the traditional as well
as the newest in folk music, Roger Williams had drawn in a much wider audience and
is therefore to be warmly congratulated.
Saturday’s performance reminded me a little of television’s Transatlantic Sessions
featuring Aly Bain with artists from Scotland, Canada and the USA. The variety of
music and performers was similar only today the six top quality artists were all
home grown.
Saturday’s performance began with Frank Robb and his guitar in an Irish version of
the song The Winter it is Past with words by Robert Burns, this version entitled
Curragh of Kildare. All the other five performers joined in the choruses giving the
music a wonderfully broad and rich appeal. There was Sandy Leggat on fiddle, Bob
Knight on guitar and vocals, Alan Walker also on guitar, Spider MacKenzie on
harmonica and soprano Yvonne Morton: a marvellously talented line up indeed.
Frank Robb’s own composition, I Call For Her, an attractive love song with intriguing
words and an engaging melody came next before Spider MacKenzie gave us another
own composition, Socks no Shoes, its title coming, so he said, because that is how he
first played it. Spider is a true virtuoso of the harmonica and the solo instrument was
totally fascinating in its appeal soon getting the audience’s feet a-tapping.
The other singer/songwriter of the group Bob Knight specialises in compositions
using the Doric dialect. His first offering, The Ground She Walks Upon was a
beautifully honest and heartfelt tribute to his wife while the second, Walker Dam,
dealt with a supernatural lass, suggesting the world of the old Scots ballads brought
up to date.
Yvonne Morton is an amazingly talented soprano whose repertoire ranges from folk
and pop to show music and the classics. Accompanied by guitarist Alan Walker she
sang a modern folk ballad Soldiers and Dreams by the Dublin songwriter Adrian
Mannering and later a traditional song Parting Glass. Here was the most delicately
spun and seductively beautiful singing that made both songs really irresistible.
Bethany’s Waltz and West Coaster were the two fiddle solos offered by Sandy Leggat
with really fine guitar accompaniments by Frank Robb – once again the feet of the
audience were set a-tapping.
Frank and Spider excelled in the blues work song Blues for the Working Man and
then the light hearted Train Blues in A – fantastic playing!
Woody Guthrie’s American Anthem, This Land Is Your Land was led by Frank Robb
with the full ensemble and most of the audience joining enthusiastically in the chorus
before the ensemble joined in Frank’s tribute to the North Sea Oil Workers: North
Sea Tiger.
