Damn few, and they're a' deid.

On Saturday we went to the first concert of the year, Tim Dalling and his Bonie Squad (pronounced 'bonny') at the Cluny - or rather Cluny2, a venue new to us, out of the back door of the pub and in again, down stairs and down more stairs to a little theatre space which must surely be below the level of the Ouseburn.

"We're going to fill the theatre with dead people!" said Tim. That has been the theme of this winter - and besides, the last time I had an evening out the room was full of phantoms. Tim's dead people weren't ghosts, though, just people who weren't alive any more. He sang songs about dead people: his grandparents, his brother, Michael Marra (and, more cheerfully, Michael Marra's song about Frida Kahlo's Visit to the Taybridge Bar). And he sang his own settings of the work of dead poets: Ernest Jones, Louis MacNeice, Julia Darling. Sometimes accompanied by Neil Harland on double bass, Ian Carr on elegant guitar and stand-up comedy, Rhona Dalling on violin, vocal and support (her own songs and banjo), sometimes solo - including a lovely a capella version of Julia Darling's Indelible, miraculous ... A good evening.