TEN GIGS - CHAPTER ONE

The Bandstand, West Cliff, Whitby. August 1983

For several years, in the mid 1980’s, my family took our annual Summer holiday in the North Yorkshire town of Whitby. Known as the setting for the opening scenes of Bram Stokers “Dracula” and sitting its splintered rocky coastline in the icy North Sea, it was obviously a perfect place for a relaxing beach vacation. I’m being cruel. It’s genuinely a beautiful town, and one that I have much fondness for, for reasons I’ll explain soon enough.

The Whitby Summer tourism schedule was tentpoled by two events, each a week long, which ran concurrently. The first was the Regatta – a fun and exciting week of boat racing, fireworks, airforce flybys, fake helicopter air-sea rescues, and a fun fair that stretched all the way along the West side of the harbour. The second event, which happened right after the regatta, was the folk week, where the town would turn into a celebration of the traddest of trad folk musics. A squeezebox in every pub, and morris dancers on every street corner. No lie. So man…