"This is the most refined (St Patrick's Day) concert I've ever been to and I'm sorry if you were expecting something different", said harpist Leah Stuttard at today's concert in St Bride's Fleet Street celebrating St Patrick's Day. Leah was one of the five musicians that make up Bardos Band. Bardos is an ancient Celtic word meaning poet-singer. Today they performed a programme that traced the tradition and origins of Celtic music. Fiddle, flutes and psaltery, gittern, lute and symphony, percussion, harp and voice combined to take the large audience on a journey through ancient Irish and Scottish music, stopping on its way at Finnish, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Yugoslavian, Bulgarian and Manx.
Less than an hour later, at half two, I was in the Temple Bar pub on Walworth Road. It's a big pub, but was already busy and very green. Guinness and lager flowed. The band playing at the front of the pub were called The Johnstons. It turns out that there was a well known 60's and 70's Irish close-harmony folk group called The Johnstons, from County Meath. Not the same Johnstons. These Johnstons (three of them - in the photo the third one is behind the pillar) are based in North London and perform a wide repertoire of tunes including the Irish-leaning music they wisely chose to play this afternoon.
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