A year or two back when Katy and I were on holiday in Northumberland, we went several times to the theatre in Alnwick. The first night was a live streamed Shakespeare, but sadly the weather was so bad that the signal was lost so we never found out how it ended! However we reurned the next night to see a group called The Old Dance School Band who proved to be very enjoyable.
The Old Dance School were formed in Birmingham in 2007. The band made up of Robin Beatty (guitar, vocals), Helen Lancaster (violin, viola), Charlie Heys (violin), Jim Molyneux (drums, percussion, accordion, vocals), Aaron Diaz (trumpet), Laura Carter (woodwind, vocals) and Adam Jarvis (double bass). In January 2012, percussionist Tom Chapman, who features on all three recordings, was replaced by multi-instrumentalist Jim Molyneux. In May 2015, violinist Samantha Norman, who also features on all previous albums, left the band and Charlie Heys joined in her place.
The band released three albums as The Old Dance School: Based On A True Story (2008), Forecast (2010) and Chasing The Light (2012) and one live album, Steer In The Night (2014). BBC Radio 2 has featured tracks from all three studio albums.
In 2015, the band took the bold step of changing their name to The Fair Rain. “We want to shed our skin,” explains founder and guitarist Robin Beatty, “We’ve known for some time that we had to make a decision in order to move forward. The new album we’ve been working on for the last 12 months feels like a real gear shift in the way we sound, so we know this is the right moment.”“We’ve come a long way since our early beginnings playing traditional music for ceilidhs and sessions. We hear a lot of, “Are you a school?”, “where were the dancers?”, “but you’re not old!”, and we don’t want our name to hold us from growing in the way we want to. We’re really grateful for the support of our followers over the years, and we realise this is a big leap of faith. We just hope they’ll come with us.”
They released their first album as ‘The Fair Rain’ in 2016 entilted Behind The Glass. Behind The Glass features one the band’s darkest tales yet. Mannequin – the story of Franz Reichelt, the French tailor who tested his flying suit invention on himself in 1912, from the Eiffel Tower. “We thought it was fitting”, says Robin Beatty. “Just like Franz Reichelt, we’re standing on the precipice.”
