Leyland Accordion Club, Leyland, Lancashire, England.

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Leyland Accordion Club - 15th September 2004

Mid West Radio

Whenever I go to Ireland I always listen to the same radio station during my visit. Now it is possible to listen to the station over the Internet. Until I was able to listen via the Internet, I used to miss the station when I was in England, I always looked forward to my next trip to Ireland. The reason I like the station is that they play real music, not drums with no tune type music but decent stuff that Radio One would not allow to be played on their station. It is common to hear Foster and Allen, Seamus Shannon, Dermot O'Brien and many other accordion players on Midwest Radio. If you would like to try the station, visit www.mnwr.ie on the Internet, click on 'Mid West Radio', then click on the image of a bakelite type radio to start listening. Some of the programmes are a great source of inspiration to accordionists for not only accordion type music but other styles that you don't normally hear in England. Sometimes they play more modern stuff but try the station at different times of day to find the best presenters and programmes.

Club Mascot

I noticed that many accordion clubs have some form of club mascot. This normally takes the form of a something like a teddy bear wearing a knitted accordion, the mascot is often placed on the stage in front of the players, or propped up nearby whenever the club plays out somewhere. I decided that Leyland Accordion Club needed such a mascot for some special occasions, and set about searching for something to match our clubs personality, something that people would look at in a mascot line-up, shake their heads, and say, 'That's obviously Leyland's mascot'. I managed to find something suitable and it will be on stage on Wednesday night. Bring your camera along if you want to be photographed on stage with our new mascot. I am sure you won't guess what it is, but you will probably like my choice.

Club Membership

It's almost that time of year again when the club membership fees are due for 2005, I am once again keeping the membership fee at the same £5 per year rate as previous years. This gets you this fabulous newsletter delivered each month. You also get in to each of our concert nights cheaper than the non members rate. Although the fee is only due in December/January, you can update your membership at the club any time between now and January to avoid a huge rush if everyone pays their membership at the last minute.

This Wednesday

This Wednesday, we have a local players concert. Apart from our December Christmas 'do', this is the last normal local players concert before 2005! Don't forget to bring your accordions. Our new mascot will be there to meet you and we will have the usual mix of nice people to chat to. Why not go and say 'hello' to someone you don't know during the break, we have a reputation for having a friendly crowd so nobody will think it strange if you just go up and chat to them. I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday.

Leyland At St. Audries Bay

Leyland club members made a difference to one of the events at the St Audries Bay festival. A ‘go as you please’ for beginners had attracted only a handful of entries and no audience at all and was in danger of being discontinued when Bob Seed put his entry called the ‘Idleburgers’ on the list. The group consisted of Bob on drums, Shirley on accordion, Bill Agnew on a 12 bass accordion with Ann on tambourine and Bill’s friend Jim (who played with him at the Leyland club) on ukelele mandolin. Their bright music caught the attention of people passing through the venue and soon the room had a capacity foot-tapping audience. Such was their success that they were asked by the organisers to play the final half hour of the sessions planned for the remaining four days. They did this with a different programme each time (which is unique at these festivals) always to full houses and including the professionals who were on site. Many of the audience were asking that they perform again next year. It was good publicity for the Leyland club, and perhaps a first for any club?

Pakefield Accordion Festival

A number of us decided last year that, due to the problems we had previously with obtaining bookings/receipts etc. at the Bridlington Festival, we would instead make the trip down to Pakefield this year. Coincidentally, I didn't get a receipt this year from Pontins despite several phone calls and promises that one would be sent, although I was told not to worry as they were happy that I had paid. On the day, It was an easy five hour 30 minute drive down the M6 and along the A14, the whole trip from Leyland to Pakefield was on just one motorway and three A roads. We arrived at the camp and were directed to wait in a large concert room until 4pm when we could queue up for our chalet keys. After the mad rush for the keys, we all had to wait in one single file queue while a badge was handwritten with our name on it. This badge was to give us admission to the concerts. With only one person doing the writing, things went a bit slow, and it was about 4.30pm before we were able to take our luggage to our chalets. We were told to find the organiser Heather Smith to purchase a programme to find out what was going on. We went to the room as directed but nobody was around to sell us a programme. We decided to take our luggage to our chalets, not knowing what time tea would be, or when the first artist was on that night, etc. Eventually, I found someone else who had seen a programme and then rang others to tell them to get out of their chalets as tea was already being served. After tea, we moved to the concert room where we eventually were able to purchase a programme for £1. The concerts were in an L shaped room that seated 300 people, the professional seat sitters got the front tables each night leaving the rest of us to take the back tables or sit at 90 degrees to the stage. The entertainers were great, there were band type workshops during the day but no workshops on specialist subjects ie. Bass Workshop, How to ... etc., instead, the emphasis was on joining a band of people to learn a set of tunes. Because of problems with the bookings, some people had to leave the camp on the Monday, while most of us stayed on until the end of the festival on Tuesday. Because of the Monday leavers, we had the daytime farewell concert on Sunday. Having the concert on Sunday felt strange when you were not leaving for another two days. The bands playing had not had much time to practice their pieces before they had to perform, but they all did a great job. It seemed an anticlimax after the bands had performed because most of us were not going home but the band practice sessions were over. On the night time concerts we enjoyed fantastic performances from Gary Blair, Johnny Coleclough, Charlie Watkins and others. I, like many others missed some of the events because times of the workshops changed but many did not know about the changes. The bar area saw entertainment each night from Bert Santilly and others. There was also a great exhibition of old accordions, this attracted a lot of attention as there were so many old and unusual designs. The owner of the accordions gave a talk on them on the Monday. The trade show was Charlie Watkins and Electronic Accordions selling their wares, I managed to get some good second hand music books from Charlie's stall. The camp and the food were good, as was the swimming pool and tennis courts - which were used every day, with one Leyland Accordion Club tennis match taking part in the rain to the amazement of people watching from the dining room. During this match, I saw Colin Ensor in the distance, hurrying from one place of shelter to another with his coat fastened up tight. Strangely, he seemed to mistake our calls and waving as a simple 'hello' instead of 'come over here and join in'! What a shame, I am sure he would have loved to get his coat off and join us for a match.

Our Website

Our internet website has had 72,267 visitors as at the 18th of October 2004, that’s 1182 visitors since last month. Over the past year or two I have been resting on my laurels as far as the website promotion is concerned, so this month I decided to spend some time promoting us to the world. I first needed a baseline to see how popular we were before I started a new marketing plan, I checked on www.google.co.uk to see how popular our website was. I searched on this search engine because it is more influential than most at bringing visitors to any site. The results were that on Google there are 978 pages returned when you search for "Leyland Accordion Club". Knowing that there are 978 pages on Google talking about Leyland Accordion Club is nice, but it doesn't give us anything to compare this figure against to see if this is a worthy figure or not. To give us something to compare this figure against, I searched Google for references to some other local clubs, namely Stockport, Wyre and Chester. The results are shown below.
Leyland 978
Stockport 46
Wyre 19
Chester 16
From this list you can see that, on the Internet, someone searching for something to do with accordions is far more likely to find our club than any of the others I checked, this trend seems to be the same when I did some countrywide club searches. Using these figures as a starting point, I have spent the last two days trying to improve these figures by a variety of methods, including making changes to the site and getting us recommended by more websites as a source of interesting accordion information. The results of this work will take about 8 weeks to show much of a difference, this is because it takes time for people to add links to their webpages, then it takes more time before Google sees these new links to our site. In a couple of months I will let you know the results. To monitor our progress yourself type "Leyland Accordion Club" in to www.google.co.uk, then note how many pages are retuned.

Strange Internet Activity

Recently I registered a new Internet domain name, this name was for use in a new accordion project I am working on. Then some strange activity that I can't explain started on the website. Firstly I noticed that I was getting some unusual activity so I delved deeper and found that, although I had only registered the name 24 hours earlier, two people, one connecting to the Internet via an exchange near Lancaster and another via the Edinburgh telephone exchange were suddenly visiting our website, sometimes minutes apart from each other, and using the new name I had just registered. This new web address currently points to our club website until I build the website that is going to use it. Having told nobody that I had registered the new website name, it was strange that it was suddenly getting visitors from two locations using it, sometimes at 2 or 3am. The same persons were visiting multiple times each day, over the last 4 days they have visited 14 times! If I solve this mystery I will let you know.

For Sale

1978 Hohner Morino VN, Full Midi, Full Microphones. Contact Phil Jones (Band Leader, Ceol Na L-Alba Scottish Country Dance Band). Telephone 0114 296 0015 or mobile 07887 844873.

Next Months Meeting

Next month we will have the return of Romano Viazzani as our guest artist. Why not ask your friends if they want to accompany you on that night, I am sure that they will be thoroughly entertained.