Welcome to the February update of Tom Doughty, Acoustic Lap Slide Guitarist, singer/songwriter, dry stone gall bladder builder.

Its all good this time around. I’m busty as hell (keep hitting the TY instead of the Y, but, still being average age 13, it makes me smile). I have a request for you. As I’ve been listening to a programme celebrating 70 years of the BBC Radio Programme ‘Desert Island Discs’ (I’m a big fan) and its very unlikely that you or I will ever feature, can I ask for comments to this newsletter:- Please tell me one of your seven Desert Island Discs and why it would be included? I’ll start the ball rolling with a song that is one of my fantasies, ‘Tilt Billings and the Student Prince’ by Leo Kottke. Its the lyrics alongside the melody that keeps rising like a phoenix from the quagmire of the ashes of the song that gets me every time.

So what’s happening?

Future gigs are getting established, a couple in February, four in March, nine in April, more work with Craig Ogden after our roaring success at the Bridgewater last October and although I would rather be mentioned in the Socialist Worker; we were featured in January’s Cheshire Life. S##t a brick!

We will be at The Two Rivers Festival in Birkenhead on 26th March and the Buxton Opera House 23rd September, with more to follow.
23/24th March sees me return to Zinc Blues Festival in Beauvais, north of Paris. I just loved it last year. Great music and atmosphere. I’m playing my local folk club, Nantwich Jazz & Blues Festival and Litchfield soon, later to Lower Brailes, Bristol University and the Cotswolds.

Here’s the big news: At the second attempt, my request for Arts Council funding to provide concerts and workshops in each UK/Eire Spinal Unit was Successful. Bose are loaning me a PA system, Yamaha Europe are supplying guitars and I’ll be hitting the road between April and June. Most gigs are confirmed but details will be on my gigs page as and when. Concerts will be held in Southport, Oswestry, Aylesbury, Harrow, Sheffield, Wakefield, Middlesbrough, Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin, Salisbury and Cardiff.

O.K., so one of your Desert Island Discs, what’s it to be?

Tom