BY MICHAEL CHOWNE
A special night of music married with community on Saturday 5th September 2026 put on by Ruth, Dave, John & Steve of promoters Red Clay Music at the Halo Theatre, Southgate in the London Borough of Enfield.
3 fantastic artists, all with different sounds, were given 50 mins to an hour each in a very full night in front of 140 attentive and appreciative music lovers.
Anybody here will know how much I adore Savannah Gardner & The Recovering Good Girls. This time Savannah gave us a different iteration of the band that not even I’d seen before – Carmen Ruiz Vicente, the mainstay and heartbeat of the band on drums usually, and sometimes piano and acoustic guitar, played a full set on ukulele bass and did a fantastic job. Multi award-winning instrumentalist Holly Carter, who is also a solo folk singer and pedal steel player, this time played that oh so beautiful electric guitar of hers to make up the trio.
Californian raised but dual nationality Brit Savannah is the consummate storyteller and show-woman and delighted the large crowd with a set completely made up of originals. Playing 6 songs from her debut ‘Recovering Good Girl’ album, there were a host of newer songs including two that were being played with a band for the first time – ‘Makin’ Honey’ & ‘Grim Reaper’. Savannah always pushes the boundaries and gives us something new which is what keeps things fresh and interesting (and, yes, in the words of the first of those two new songs, she’s ‘kinda cute’ and ‘very funny’)!
There really is nobody out there producing music quite like Savannah’s brand of outlaw country, roots and swing and it was gratifying to hear, as I did last night, from somebody I’ve known for years finally seeing her for the first time and saying ‘wow, you weren’t exaggerating!’. Who knows, maybe I do know what I’m talking about?! Look out for Savannah’s second album, being recorded this autumn.
Second up were a band completely new to me, The Grand Old Echo. Styling themselves as City-Folk with the occasional rap or Folk, Bluegrass and an Essex accent, partners Alex Miller and Jenni Grossmann (the latter I think from Hamburg) and their Hong Kong friend Jon Ip thoroughly entertained the crowd with their upbeat music. Personally not as keen on the rap (though it was certainly different in amongst the bluegrass), and thankfully it was more Red Hot Chili Peppers than Jay-Z.
As well as some interesting originals and Alex juggling whilst singing (that was a first for me!) they gave us really cool sounding covers of Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’, Molly Tuttle’s ‘El Dorado’ and Gregory Alan Isakov’s ‘Amsterdam’. With fiddle, banjo, mandolin, harmonica, acoustic guitar and strong harmonies, what’s not to like? All 3 sing lead from time to time too, even if Alex is very much the frontman.
Also blowing everybody away was opener Amy Belle. Glaswegian Amy found fame way back in 2004 when she sung ‘I Don’t Want To Talk About It’ on stage at the Royal Albert Hall with Rod Stewart. Whilst she should be rightly proud of that and the millions of YouTube streams, Amy is not defined by that as an artist. Her songwriting now shows the quality that can only come from putting in the ‘10,000 hours’ (the lyric to one of her songs) and the only sadness is that she’s yet to record anything since getting back into music – her last release was in 2009! An almost full set of exquisite originals sung in that beautiful, sometimes powerful voice, showed what a rich seam there is to choose from. ‘Home’, ‘Square One’, the wonderful ‘Slow Down Time’ (written about her daughters) and the fabulously self-deprecating ‘Idiot’ were all fine examples. Amy’s signature encore of Janis Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’, sung acapella, was her only cover and had everyone joining in. Superb.
