Fiddling wiz Gordie “Crazylegs” MacKeeman heads to Shoreham

It will be a great chance to watch again the elastic-legged band leader as he demonstrates his unique blend of Canadian clogging and step dancing in a show widely praised for its joyful abandonment.

“We've been together for about 12 years now,” Gordie says, “and we are a roots act by which I really mean to encompass rockabilly and old-time fiddle-style and country and folk and some of our traditional fiddling music as well. We used to come across to the UK lots before Covid. We've done maybe 20 tours over there and we would come across the UK maybe one or twice a year and we've just always loved playing there.

“But we have not been to the UK since 2019. As a musician obviously the pandemic really hit hard and I suppose we just shifted gears a little bit. We all work on day jobs and we all fell back on those a little bit more. But I also work as an early-childhood educator, and the pandemic gave me the time to do a project that I had always wanted to do. I recorded a children's folk album called Folk For Little Folk. It's not really a children's album specifically. I'd say it's a family album and adults can enjoy it as well but it's something that I’d wanted to do for a while and it had just been a question of trying to find the time to do it and that was the hard thing, but the good thing was it gave me a really nice musical focus, something else to get musically excited about.”

It's a lovely prospect to be coming back to the UK now at long last: “But I would not say that things are totally back to normal. The world of travelling has definitely changed since 2019 and travelling can be so much more hectic now at airports but I do think that perhaps it's slowly starting to turn around again. It does feel great to get back to touring. As a band we are kind of flitting between being musicians and time with our young families but it's going be good to be performing and touring again. It's a big part of my life and just something that I love to do. We are much more of a live act than a recording band. We always have high energy.

“And it's funny for us how comfortable we feel in the UK but then again I suppose we're not that far away. It certainly feels so much like home whenever we go there. Our part of Canada is closer than you think. It is only five or six hours flight and for us that's not really that far. But I can't put my finger on why it just feels so very homely to us, and I really love how good the folk scene in the UK is, just how strong it is and it just makes it all feel like a really good place for us to be. There are so many folk festivals in the UK, and after ten years you would think that we would be starting to repeat them, but there are always new ones to find.”

Tickets for the gig are available from the venue directly on https://ropetacklecentre.co.uk/