All the recorder-baiting here is of course all very tongue-in-cheek. Usually. Still, I cast my barbs hoping a particular recorder player, who knows who I am behind my C&F nick and lurks here occasionally, will read them and seethe (hey, Tom!! ). We’re actually good friends, if I may be so bold, and not least because he does NOT play recorder at ITM sessions. He thinks it’s just wrong, and you gotta respect that attitude. Steve, you might be interested to know that not only is he a very good button accordion player, but he plays a real mean harmonica too, and has done so admirably at sessions on the rare occasion that he forgot the squeezebox.
Well, exactly. This guy used to bring three wooden ones to the session and, man, they were LOUD! He greased 'em up before we started by eating two or three packs of pork scratchings, and he claimed that he warmed them up to get them in tune by putting them down the front of his trousers. Despite the voluminous nature of the pants-front in question and the undoubted heat generated therein it distresses me to have to report that “being in tune” was a foreign concept to him. A bonus to him emanating from this practice was that no-one ever asked to borrow his re***der. I can’t think why not.
If a very large Englishman comes to your session and starts to play Sir Sidney Smith’s March on the re*der, do NOT attempt to accompany him on the bdhrn!
There’s one that’ll show up here maybe once or twice a year. Poor guy has the unfortunate habit of drooling when he plays. We call him “Mr. Spittle”. Come to think of it, he’s a bit on the sebaceous side, himself.
What’s up with these socially challenged recorder players, anyway? Is it, like, part of the package?
In the days when I used to go to the session at the Welly in Boscastle we were occasionally joined by this itinerant lady called Jan (because of her chosen domicile we bestowed on her the soubriquet “Jan the Van” - geddit?). She was much given to playing tunes on a very cheap plastic recorder (we just let her get on with it). One night she brought a guitar with her and a young person whom we took to be her teenage daughter. Jan the Van was part-way through a set of tunes when the daughter picked up the guitar. Jan spotted this out of the corner of her eye, stopped playing, roared out a string of obscenities to the effect that she would rather the girl put down the guitar immediately and then - the good bit - seamlessly picked up the tune and carried on playing as if nothing had happened. A rare moment of magic, and from a re***der player too!
I hope I haven’t been misunderstood. I don’t think recorders should be allowed in sessions if other players don’t want them. I do think that one jig BigDavy sent me was wonderful. But that was a recording not a session. I just think they sound fine as instruments on the occassions I have heard them, which would not have been in a session.
That man sounds like a particularly revolting sort. I think of recorder players as being very clean and quiet people.
If you like the track, you have loved the live version even better, that tune is my favourite one that any of the incarnations of OBD played.
The live version was effectively Johnny Hardie on recorder with Dave Cattanach on djembe with minimal backing from the rest of the band, man it kicked ass.
). 
We’re actually good friends, if I may be so bold, and not least because he does NOT play recorder at ITM sessions. He thinks it’s just wrong, and you gotta respect that attitude. Steve, you might be interested to know that not only is he a very good button accordion player, but he plays a real mean harmonica too, and has done so admirably at sessions on the rare occasion that he forgot the squeezebox.
A bonus to him emanating from this practice was that no-one ever asked to borrow his re***der. I can’t think why not. 
