Self Portraits

Enjoy nearly two hours of Mike's wit, old favourites and more recent harp compositions.

  This includes post and packing cost Worldwide

                                    

  CD 1   58:52

  1.   Pax Romana  mp3

 2.   Saudi Arabian Alcoholics Anonymous

 3.   Bill the Mammoth Basher

 4.   Montmartre Café 

 5.   Carrickfergus  

 6.   The Ancient Briton  

 7.   John the Bog  

 8.   Natasha the Flasher  

 9.   Keep on Good Terms with Worms  

10.  WPC Sadie Stick, MacLagan and Bomber Dina

11.  Intro to How Divine

12.  How Divine  

13.  Walking in the Dry Hills of Spain

 

CD 2   57:35

  1.   Boolavogue

 2.   Agincourt

 3.   The Vegetarian Cat

 4.   You take my Fear Away

 5.   The Goal of a Mole  

 6.   The Terrible Werewolves

 7.   Intro to Passion Flower  

 8.   Passion Flower

 9.   Benzedrine

10.  Hector the Dope Sniffing Hound

11.  Mrs Fanshaw

12.  Kära Du

13.  Un Homme ne meurt jamais d'Amour

 

All songs written, composed and arranged by Mike Absalom between 1971 and 1999.

Recorded on October 10, 2002 at The Prince of Wales, Stafford, by Mark Watson (thank you Jim Wheeler for organising the gig!), and on October 11, 2002 at The Wurzelbush Folk Club, British Legion, Brinklow, by Charlie Pritchard (and thank you Dave Sampson for booking me once again, thirty years on!).

Copyright Mike Absalom.

Paintings by Mike Absalom, sleeve design by Charlie Pritchard and Cornelia Weinmann.
 

Self Portraits is a live recording taken from Mike Absalom’s performances at two English folk clubs in October 2002.

Since 1980, having turned away from the brilliant satire and humour with which he had made his UK reputation in the 60’s and 70’s, Mike had been aging gracefully in British Columbia, Canada, performing as a harpist and children’s entertainer in North and South America, studying music in Paraguay, and utterly unaware that his reputation as a wickedly funny entertainer lived on behind him on the other side of the Atlantic.

In 2000, in the small rural community of Maple Ridge, where he was enjoying a quiet life as a kindly and avuncular kids’ puppeteer and where, tuxedoed pillar of the community, he played the Celtic harp at the posher local weddings, he decided one day to connect himself to the Internet.

The result was rather like the awakening of Rip Van Winkle. Typing his name into a search engine he was amazed to find his past extolled in a dozen languages as a unique (if minor) historical icon from the Flowery Powery years. He set up his own website, and to his amazement began to receive a regular trickle of fan mail, a thing that had never happened to him in his actual performing years as a comedian. Having now come to the conclusion that there were a sufficient number of UK greybeards who still remembered him to warrant a touring foray, he set about finding out who was still alive and who would like to book him.

The result was a two week tour, in which Mike revived many of the hilarious songs and poems with which he had trod the boards of the college and folk club circuits in his heyday, and to which he added the Celtic harp, his Paraguayan experience and the lyrical compositions that have come out of his twenty-five expatriate years.

This live recording is a sampling of that tour. And it turned out that the audience was not entirely composed of Mike’s former fans. Their children and their children’s children were just as enthusiastic!

 

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