Old Git Music

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 05 December 2005 22:12:23

Tomorrow I'm off to a residential thing. I'm a trustee of a national Welsh charity, which is a Good Thing most of the time. The residential is a particularly Good Thing though, as it involves Old Git Music.

Many of the other trustees of the organisation are people who were good hippies in the 70s, found they needed to earn a crust, and went in to the same line of work that I'm in now because it appealed to their idealism. And I admire them a lot, because they've kept the idealism and worked hard for the cause. I also admire them for their fab taste in music - Old Git Music.

Old Git Music, for those unfamiliar with the genre, mainly consists of 60s/70s singer-songwriter sort of music. We're talking James Taylor; Cat Stevens; Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel - etc etc. It's Ageing Hippy music. When the organisation went through a rebranding earlier this year, what was the headline of the article they used to alert the membership to the name change?

- 'The Times they are a'changing.'

Old Gits. Hippies. Cool people.

So on this residential, after the dinner at a non-corporate family run hotel, we sit around in a circle and pass... no, not that, a guitar. And sing Old Git music. So I've had the guitar out tonight and gone through some Old Git numbers myself. Tomorrow the hotel will echo to the dubious pleasure of hearing me sing things like Strawberry Fields, Moonshadow, The Boxer and so on. Plus a couple of Waterson Carthy songs, because they're such hippies that they even like hardcore folkie stuff.

And Richard Thompson's 'God loves a drunk', which will be very reassuring by the end of the night.