This weekend (18th-20th of May) saw yet another fabulous Swaledale Squeeze, organised as ever by Jane Edwards. It’s a really special weekend, with concertina players from all over the country - and beyond - descending on a youth hostel in Yorkshire to make music together. The evening sessions carry on well into the night, and I achieved what I think is a personal best this year by staying up until a quarter to five on Sunday morning.

As a result of these late night sessions, Steve Bradley and I have been talking vaguely about doing “a project” for the last couple of years, but the logistics, given that I live in Birmingham and he lives in Durham, aren’t ideal. So this time round we took the opportunity to skip a workshop at Swaledale and record a couple of songs.

Needless to say these recordings are the product of almost no rehearsal time, very little equipment set-up time, and an unhealthy amount of sleep deprivation, so they’re far from perfect; but they were fun to make, and there can be few Pink Floyd covers doing the rounds involving English concertina, Maccann duet concertina, and a foot-operated Shruti Box all recorded in a single take (no overdubs!). So there’s some novelty value at least! The songs are from Roger Waters’s great anti-war Pink Floyd LP, The Final Cut, which you should of course buy from Amazon or somewhere equally suitable if you don’t already own it…

Interestingly, our concertinas were both manufactured within a few years of each other by Wheatstone & Co. and have the same kind of ebony ends, and aside from differences in volume in places, the two instruments blend together so well that it’s difficult to tell them apart, especially when Steve is playing chordally.

Download The Gunner’s Dream (3.5 MB)

Steve Bradley - first vocal, English concertina
Stuart Estell - second vocal, Maccann duet concertina

Download Paranoid Eyes (2.8 MB)

Steve Bradley - English concertina, foot-operated Shruti box
Stuart Estell - vocal, Maccann duet concertina (in instrumental break)