For Folk's Sake! Mama Rosin + Eliza the Bear + Ottersgear

Event information

The Magpie's Nest joins forces with our kindred spirits in Manchester – For Folk's Sake – for a night of the hottest emerging Folk and Acoustic Artists from Manchester. Not only that, we've managed to smuggle in a headline slot from the touring and kick ass young Cajun outfit Mama Rosin! Bonuses all round.


Mama Rosin: ‘Power trio’ used to imply headbanging rock, leaden lead-guitar, thrashed bass plus an unfeasibly large drum kit. But Mama Rosin, the extraordinary Swiss Cajun/Zydeco subversives trash all this with amped-up/echoed-up melodeon (Cyril Yeterian), guitar/banjo/rub-board (Robin Girod) and serious drumming (Xavier "Gérard Guilain" Bray).

These young rebels live and love the Cajun/Zydeco music style, whose roots go way back to the 18th century. Cajun music was brought to the South of the United States, to Louisiana, by French immigrants from Canada, where fast rhythms met slow waltz. Zydeco music added Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Songs were sung in French and/or in Creole. The vocals were usually very high and loud so even people at the back could hear them!

Eliza The Bear (Manchester): This is a strongly contemporary voice, but always on the edges of myth, dream, fairy-tale. The title sequence is remarkable: a sustained piece of dramatic-poetic writing, a tour-de-force.

Ottersgear (Manchester): Brought to life in the summer of 2008 Ottersgear made it’s first steps in Quernmore, Lancaster, on the tip of the Trough of Bowland, as a recording project by One Chip Potato frontman Mikey Kenney. The first EP (Rising Balloon) tells the tale of an alcoholic who, in need of rest, walks into the lonely company of the trough and overcomes his struggle with alcohol. using folk themes and mythological metaphors Ottersgear opens the listener’s mind eye to the world Mikey has made for himself out on the moors. Ottersgear is now being performed as a live project with Mikey leading an ensemble of talented musicians, including Andrew Raven (Hows My Pop?), Dan Haywood (Dan Haywood’s New Hawks), Mia Bleach (Dan Haywoood’s New Hawks), Blind Simon Pilot (Three Dimensional Tanks) and Charley Weatherill.