St Bonaventures Parish Club
A fantastic evening spent last Monday at the Tunnels with Eilen Jewell and her band, gives me the excuse to chat about something I’ve been meaning to say for a while, that is, how much I like St Bonaventures Parish Club here in Bristol.
http://www.eilenjewell.com/
I spend a lot of time listening to Spotify while working and one of favourites of last year was Eilen Jewell which I had first heard on the excellent Mark Lamarr friday night show on Radio 2. Hoping that she might be playing in the country at some point I had a look at her website and first saw the name St Bonaventures, Bristol. It was somewhere I had never heard of and turned out to be about 15 minutes walk from my house, I checked out the website http://www.crhmusic.com/ and there on the billing was my other favourite singer of the moment Diana Jones – fantastic!
Diana Jones, http://dianajonesmusic.com/
So last October and with a skeptical but hopeful Carol, I went along to this old style parish club behind a church with sofas, good beer (Doom Bar) and one of the warmest sound systems you have ever heard and had one of the best nights of the year, see a review here:
http://www.crackerjack.co.uk/bristol/review/eilen-jewell-st-bonaventures/music-0
Not only that we got to meet the band, say ridiculous things to them (so what can you say..?) and had a short starlit night walk home with massive smiles on our faces.
The next week we found ourselves there again, this time with Diana Jones, this turned out to be an emotional night. Diana’s voice and songs were so beautiful and sad, you could hear a pin drop and when she put down he guitar and belted out a powerful gospel song a capella – the audience were in tears.
Folowing these two we’ve now been to many nights there, notably Amanda Shires with Rod Picott http://www.amandashires.net, Elizabeth Cook http://www.elizabeth-cook.com/ and Po’ Girl http://www.pogirl.net
Recently some of the larger gigs have been held at the new Tunnels venue, which is a friendly place by the station, along with Eilen Jewell we saw the Chatham County Line boys there http://www.chathamcountyline.com/
Look them up, http://www.crhmusic.com/, go and see a gig, St Bonaventures is proof again the Bristol is full of surprises!