There are two types of wassail: the one where you sing at apple trees and honey bees, and the door-to-door cheeky begging variety, which is the precursor to modern carol singing.
Just like the bar in The Blues Brothers which does both types of music (country and western), I’ve dabbled in assorted wassails over the years. I’ve sung at bees in suburban back gardens and young apple trees in Hurstpierpoint; and I’ve exchanged insults with Walthamstow cheesemongers and sang at unsuspecting passers by through dreary north London streets.
But it’s been years since I’ve done a proper house-visiting wassail, and so it was with considerable excitement that I learned Sally from Brighton Folk Choir was planning a charity pub crawl wassail for Christmas – for an excellent cause, too.
We started off at The Eddy, aka The Edinburgh, on Upper Gloucester Road. This was not long after 7pm, and, with the exception of a couple of geezers at the back, the pub was entirely filled by the choir and its acolytes. I bullied Martha into buying me a pint, then Jo, our choir leader, explained that the point was to sing first, THEN get a drink. “Otherwise there’s lots of awkward hanging around and we kind of lose momentum”.
Oh.
The next pub was more successful – the wonderful Evening Star, a small freehouse on the approach to Brighton station. We sang one song outside – drowned out, somewhat, by the gyratory traffic, especially the buses. These included one bonkers Christmas double decker festooned with festive lights, complete with unconvincing Santa, who shouted something incomprehensible at us.
Inside was much better, and songs successfully completed, we stayed for a half (this, apparently, is the right way round of doing things), before singing an encore. My Mongolian friend Billie joined us briefly, fresh off the train from her London corporate job – she looked suitably bemused and amazed by our festive shenannigans.
Sally had informed pubs beforehand, but of course, the punters were none the wiser. For each pub, me and Sally would wander in and scope out the space, deciding whether there was space for us all to fit in. Usually, there was.
Our performances felt a bit like the “guerrilla gigs” popular with landfill indie bands of the mid noughties, except people seemed relieved it was some festive folk singing gorgeous folk tunes and not, say, The Maccabees.
After singing inside The Pond – wassailers very much taking up 90% of the pub’s floor space – we sang at the door of the Blue Man restaurant. To quote the Gower Wassail:
“There’s us wassail folk growing weary and cold / Drop a bit of small silver into our old bowl”.
We did have an actual wassail bowl, but also a QR code and card readers, because even wassailers have to move with the times.
While finishing up outside Blue Man we attracted a bunch of admirers who started filming us on their phones; meanwhile, a rival choir walked past. They were singing carols, to our wassails – “we’re not as fancy as you”, one of them cheerily claimed.
Blue Man is on a traffic calmed street, hence pedestrians gathering to listen – I so wish more of Brighton was like that. Our next stop, at the Vine Street tap, gave us a lovely sense of how beautiful this city could be if it wasn’t 95% reserved for the private motor vehicle: the bar was far too small for the choir, so we sang outside in the street.
People in the houses opposite started leaning out of their windows to listen, including a mother and baby and a gaggle of kids in an attic room. It was a gorgeous moment, only briefly interrupted by a couple of Asda and Tesco delivery vans.
After showing off our king (a stuffed wren in a box), and singing Happy Birthday for a random young pub dweller called Tom, we headed down to our last pub of the evening, The Basketmakers Arms.
The staff here were a bit jobsworth-y, saying that the chain’s management didn’t allow people raising money, but that we could sing and collect outside of we wanted. In the end, we decided to sing “spontaneously” in the pub, before heading outside for a few more.
It was all impossibly gorgeous. I am so happy to have found this beautiful gang of souls, and to sing with them in what felt like a nod to the past, but also to a more optimistic version of the future.
jamesofwalsh 