First published here, November 2021

During the COVID lockdown of 2020 regular gigs at the Roots Music Club in Doncaster were cancelled, but the club planned to publish the audio from a number of previous concerts as YouTube videos as a way of keeping in touch with its audience.

I presented concept artwork for two of the proposed concerts, which I compiled into short videos to demonstrate how the transitions would work when edited together in iMovie. The artwork was based around the posters I had previously produced for the relevant concerts and I sought to retain elements of the visual identity I had crafted within that series of posters.

Artwork for the first of these (Jez Lowe) was used in one of the Club’s YouTube videos, but I was unhappy with the way in which it was edited. Sections of the artwork were lost through the use of the wrong aspect ratio (cropping large parts of the image on the left and right), and a series of inappropriate image transitions meant the carefully balanced relationships between the text and the background image were lost completely.

The artwork for the second (Dave Burland) wasn’t used at all so I chose not to present any further material for consideration. Subsequent YouTube videos included a combination of elements from my original proposal (again, with significant image loss due to aspect ratio issues), some of my poster images and an assortment of (what I considered to be) outdated title templates. It felt like a missed opportunity to present something visually interesting to accompany the audio, but we were in the middle of a global pandemic so ultimately it seemed churlish to make too big a deal out of it.

We all moved on, and although the pandemic still hasn’t disappeared, Roots Music Club have now started to put on more concerts and I’m still making their posters. The video files have sat in my iMovie folder for almost 18 months so I thought it might be interesting to resurrect them, if only to justify the several hours of work I put into them at the time that would otherwise be completely wasted. The finished YouTube videos would have featured complete concert recordings, but these clips include single songs from the respective artists as they were simply designed to give an impression of what the finished YouTube videos might look and sound like.

I’ve slightly edited the Jez Lowe clip, as the original showed a single static image throughout most of the song, so I’ve changed it to be more in line with the Dave Burland clip, which switches between two images after the original ‘presents’ title card. Otherwise, these are as I presented them in June 2020.

http://www.rootsmusicclub.co.uk

May 25

“The Ballad of Tom Joad”

By Kevin Boyd

First published on YouTube, May 2020

I originally made this in my teenage bedroom over 30 years ago with two VHS video recorders, some gaffer tape and a ball of string (probably!!). I was just discovering Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck and Rory McLeod all at the same time. The Grapes of Wrath was on TV so, on a bit of an impulse, I decided to try and make Woody’s words – as sung by Rory – fit with John Ford’s visuals. I was as surprised as anyone that it worked so well. I didn’t keep a copy and had forgotten it even existed until my friend Allan Wilkinson (of Northern Sky Reviews) recently shared a super lo-fi version he’d managed to keep hold of for over three decades. With little else to do to occupy my time during the Covid-19 lockdown, I decided to re-make it with a few minor changes but hopefully retaining the charm and spontaneity of the original.

TOM JOAD written by Woody Guthrie

Rory McLeod: Vocals / Guitar / Harmonica. Rab Noakes: Guitar. Rod Clements: Bass

From the album: WOODY LIVES!: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie (Black Crow Records, 1987

THE GRAPES OF WRATH starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. Directed by John Ford. Based on the novel by John Steinbeck

Edited by Kevin Boyd (Original edit: c. 1988 – New edit: May 2020)

Apr 22

Roots Music Club unused 2020 posters

By Kevin Boyd

First published by Roots Music Club , March – April 2020

All gigs at Roots Music Club were postponed from the middle of March due to the Covid-19 lockdown but I already had a handful of posters for upcoming gigs completed and ready to publish. Given the number of hours taken to complete each of these, it would be a shame if they didn’t see the light of day. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to rework some or all of them with new dates later in the year, but here they are in the meantime (the Evie Ladin Band was completed before the gig was changed to just Evie and Keith Terry).