root salad Alden, Patterson & W

e’ve found a new group. And like a puppy with a shoe in its mouth we’ve come run- ning in excitedly to show you

and now fully expect you to be as excited as we are. Look what we’ve found!

Alden, Patterson & Dashwood seem less thrilled to meet me than I am them, which is the ongoing tragedy of the band/fan dynamic. It’s also got something to do with the multi-hour, frequently static motorway journey they’ve just endured from their home in Norwich to tonight’s gig venue in Colchester. Their dinner was hastily grabbed at a service station.

“I wouldn’t call it dinner!” laughs Christi- na Alden. “Expensive soggy sandwiches.”

This is the reality of a gigging group on the road; spending most of their lives living in a Ginster’s paradise.

Any doubts I might’ve had that Alden, Patterson & Dashwood really were a new discovery and not simply overlooked old hands were banished when I noticed we had no mutual Facebook friends – a phe- nomenon almost unheard of in the social network age.

“You’re not from Norwich, that’s why,” reckons Christina (voice and guitar). “Nor- wich is very tiny.”

“And we’ve all played in bands that

weren’t strictly folk,” explains Noel Dash- wood (other voice and dobro). “So the folk scene is a new thing for us.”

“I was brought up going to folk festi- vals,” counters Alex Patterson (violin and mandolin).

“Well then where are your folk friends on Facebook?” teases Noel.

“My mum was in a little folk band when I was a kid,” is Christina’s application for citizenship. “But the village fête type. They were called Jenny Nettles which is a Scots name for daddy-long-legs apparently.”

“I think living out in Norwich you are disconnected from everywhere else,” says Alex. “A lot of festivals happen in East Anglia and we get booked for those and then we tend not to go further because it’s miles away.”

I don’t need them to belong. I don’t need them to be the next band with him and her in it. Alden, Patterson & Dashwood feel special. They sound special. The bluest bluegrass with the Englishest of voices and a slight Irish accent on the fiddle.

“I wanted to play music with Christina ever since I saw her singing. It’s been a dream of mine,” says Noel, touchingly.

“The fiddle and dobro work so well

together,” says Christina. “The band is about these lovely combinations. Alex and I are a couple so we work on the songs a lot together.”

We can picture their idyllic home life. Tunes shared around an open fire…

“It’s not round a fire! But we don’t have a telly so... Alex has bought me loads of old folk song books so I trawl those look- ing for stuff. Then we’ll always have a prac- tice with Noel once a week. We’ll make a meal together, eat then play.”

With the exception of three traditional

numbers (The Riddle Song, Sweet And Low and Mole In The Ground), the sumptuous songs on their debut album Call Me Home are credited to the trio equally.

“That was so we didn’t have to write on each track who did what!” admits Alex. “We ran out of room on the CD insert. Christina writes most of the songs. We’ve co-written one of them…”

“But then there’s Alex’s tunes and

Noel’s written songs and also tunes that aren’t on this album,” adds Christina.

So it’s sort of equal. While Noel works by day as a carer, a job he says he’d happily do for free if he didn’t have to pay rent, both Alex and Christina work part time. I

wonder aloud if that’s so they can dedicate their spare hours to music.

“It’s because I couldn’t deal with work- ing full time,” Christina says through gritted teeth. “No, music is the thing that I love.”

“We’ve got living on hardly anything down to a fine art,” says Alex.

A

string of positive reviews backs up our own giddy proclamation that Call Me Home is the most exciting debut album of the year. Acclaim is also still new to the band. During the show they talk of hearing The Riddle Song on the Radio 2 Folk Show and being excit- ed because no one had told them it was going to be played.

“It’s great,” beams Christina. “We’ve all worked so hard on it, particularly Alex and the amount of hours he put in to recording and producing it.”

“The most surprising thing is that we really like it,” Noel marvels. “I could listen to it over and over and I’ve never done any music like that before in my life. There’s no cringe moment of ‘Oh no, here comes the flat note!’”

Alex sees his chance. “Yeah, that’s cos I got rid of them all.”

aldenpattersonanddashwood.com F 17 f

Dashwood We’ve found a new group! Tim Chipping seizes the chance to be fRoots town crier. Oyez! Oyez!

Photo: Tony Bell