Crane Drivin' Music - the website

Subject: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Crane Driver
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 06:47 PM

Well, we've finally entered the digital age with our own website (even the spider in the shed had one before us) - it's at http://www.cranedrivinmusic.com.   Please check it out and tell us what you think.

There's likely to be more gallery pictures posted shortly - so don't feel left out (or complacent).

Andrew & Carole

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Charley Noble
Date: 28 Apr 07 - 07:06 PM

Andrew and Carole-

Congratulations on successfully launching your new website. We are honored to be included in your gallery of friends; however, we're not sure what the rock thinks of it.

Cheerily,
Charley Noble and JudyB

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Mick Tems
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 10:23 AM

Great website! Carole, you look even more radiant. Nice review!

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Tweed
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 10:49 AM

Very nice Crane. Hey, I got a question. Why do newlyweds jump the broom over there? Where'd that come from??

Tweed

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: concertina ceol
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 10:53 AM

gypsies jumped over brooms in england to signify that they were married - don't know if they still do?

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Tweed
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 11:12 AM

Hmmm. yeah, but why the broom? What was the symbolism of that? Sorry for the thread drift but I saw Mr. and Mrs. Driver jumping over one on their picture pages and got curious about the background of this custom. Mebbe it's the Lost Tribe of Israel's defiant answer to the Jewish custom of breaking a glass or Greek plate smashings??
As in, "Hey, you break it, you sweep it up. We're outta here."

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Scooby Doo
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 11:14 AM

Andrew and Carol,
Well done with the website and congratulations on your first wedding anniversary together.
Kind regards.
Scooby

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Dave Earl
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 12:09 PM

Yeah good site.

Have posted to your Guest Book therein.

Dave

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 07:53 PM

good thing you wrote "Some of our friends" as I notice a distinct lack of Ozcatters!

Congratulations of the launch of your new site, I especially enjoyed reading your biographies.

and don't forget that your next visit to Oz needs to include a 4th Sat (Feb-Nov) in Sydney so you can participate in the best folk club in Oz.

sandra

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: TRUBRIT
Date: 29 Apr 07 - 10:53 PM

Really nice website.....nice job......

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: GUEST,SussexCarole
Date: 30 Apr 07 - 07:55 AM

Thank you all for so many compliments - we're glad you like it!
I'll let Andrew explain the broom jumping custom Tweed - the origins vary according to area. It was certainly less messy than plate smashing!
Piccys! Now as Andrew said....these galleries are far from complete. There's lots more pics to go on and collages are underway so expect the unexpected.
Sandra - the dates for our visit to Oz have to be in January as there will be a reunion for Andrew's family to celebrate a special occasion. Sorry we can't make February but we're hoping to see you all while we're down under.
Our Oz Cat friends pics will be up shortly.
Carole

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Scooby Doo
Date: 30 Apr 07 - 08:07 AM

Carole and Andrew,
You are so lucky to have friends in so many parts of the world.

Scooby

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: ranger1
Date: 30 Apr 07 - 12:24 PM

Great site, Carole and Andrew.

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Crane Driver
Date: 30 Apr 07 - 02:44 PM

Mr Tweed, you have asked a difficult question. The short answer is, no-one knows. Lots of people have had good guesses though.

Rather than commit thread drift on my own thread, I've started a new thread here, in the hopes that more discussions will follow.

Sandra - I did warn people not to get complacent - there are more pictures to come - and it may be you!

Andrew

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Ferrara
Date: 30 Apr 07 - 08:45 PM

Oh, it's wonderful! Great photos and a fun site. Quite an accomplishment.

One enhancement I'd love to see: On the page where the individual songs on each CD are listed, it would be nice to have a short blurb similar to the one in the liner notes, to show the range of subjects and themes and more about the historical context of Andrew's songs.

The new CD arrived Friday. Great timing, you two! I had listened (twice through) to our pre-release version in the car that day. Sure was a surprise to get home and find another copy there. [BG]

Severn did a great version of "Lifeboat Horses" at the Baltimore Shanty Sing this month. Your music is making quite a hit in the Washington-Baltimore-Annapolis area.

R.

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Crane Driver
Date: 14 May 07 - 05:50 PM

OK - in response to feedback, we've extended the site with a songbook section - words and notes to the 25 original songs we've recorded. So, if you want to sing one of our songs, you can at least see what we actually wrote - even if you choose to change it! Remember, it's at http://www.cranedrivinmusic.com - why not sign our guestbook?

Andrew & Carole

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Hawker
Date: 14 May 07 - 06:03 PM

Nice site there Andrew & Carole, and good to see you at the weekend and share our little corner of the field! Hope you got out OK! I had visions of camper and caravan pushing shanties!
Cheers, Lucy

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Dame Pattie Smith EPNS
Date: 14 May 07 - 06:15 PM

I remember that photo!! See I couldn`t have been that drunk. It`s a really good website. X

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: GUEST,Valmai Goodyear
Date: 15 May 07 - 05:00 AM

It's a fine site: come and see us in the Lewes Arms again as soon as you can.

By the way, the story about the battle to get Harveys bitter back into the Lewes Arms in the teeth of Greene King has made it into the German national magazine Der Spiegel. It's roughly equivalent to a combination of The Times and all the Observer colour supplements rolled into one:

From Der Spiegel, 30th. April 2007, page 136.
Rough translation by Valmai Goodyear, German A-level 1972.

THE BEER'S ON!
Thomas Huetlin

Global Village: In English Lewes the regulars at a pub take on a big brewery – and overturn the rules of globalisation.

(Caption under picture of eight deliriously happy people pretending to drink Harveys:)
Regulars in front of the Lewes Arms: flicking bar towels at the dancers

Valmai Goodyear strides up the narrow streets of Lewes, East Sussex and it looks as if yet another quiet week-end awaits her, of the sort the lady has had to get used to since that fateful date of 10th. December last year. That was the day on which her favourite drink in her favourite local, a pub called The Lewes Arms, was removed at a single stroke. In her left hand Mrs. Goodyear carries a white five-litre container whose contents are the kernel of the conflict, Harveys bitter, brewed half a mile down the hill in the eponymous Harveys Brewery for over 200 years. 'It's our beer,' says Goodyear.

What binds her to this beer is a sense of closeness and familiarity. Many people in Lewes share Mrs. Goodyear's view: 'Harveys is our beer.' It was a passion which allowed beautiful evenings in Lewes to be that little bit more beautiful and which was thwarted by one single thing: Greene King, the publicly-quoted big brewery which acquired the most important pub in the town in the shape of the Lewes Arms. For Greene King a market share was eluding them, not a spiritual home, and every time 'our beer' was ordered the brewing giant experienced a small defeat.

It simply removed Harveys Bitter from the bill of fare.

Valmai Goodyear, dressed in earthy colours and also deeply entrenched in other ways, looks sharp and scornful. 'They couldn't have looked for better opponents. People in Lewes take up the struggle when they feel injustice is being done to them.'

It was less injustice and more ineptitude, as the law is completely on the side of the giant. Greene King's strategy was, in the context of a beer market which is becoming globalised, a completely normal squeezing-out operation. Most proceed without problems. Pub customers first swallow the alteration, then the new beer. They do not call for a boycott of the local as Mrs. Goodyear and her friends have done. They do not stand with posters round their necks by the door of a boozer and persuade chance tourists wandering past to drink their beer elsewhere.

The sun shines, it's spring and from up here you can scent the sea-salt from the coast 17 kilometres away, but Mrs. Goodyear says, 'It's very, very depressing.' She has not seen the inside of her favourite pub for 132 days. 'It's not enough to make you slit your wrists, but it feels as if one of the family was on their deathbed and you weren't allowed to visit them.'

When you hear her talk you get the impression that the Lewes Arms was like a home – but much better. There were no computer games, no television, no juke box, only the customers and their conversation. 'If you had a problem,' says Mrs. Goodyear, 'you went to the Arms and you'd find an answer there.'

In the Lewes Arms there was good humour, good beer and good ideas. People invented competitions, as the English love to do, and played them out in front of the pub's door.

A world pea-throwing championship. A spaniel race for all sorts of dogs and people, provided they are dressed as cocker spaniels. A game by the name of dwyle-flunking with highly individual rules. Two teams dress up as rustics and dance to mediaeval music. In the centre of the activity people take it in turns to stir a bar-towel floating in stale beer with a stick. When the music stops, they must fling the bar-towel at one of the dancers.

It's three points for a hit on the head, two for a hit on the body and at the end everything goes to a charitable cause. Mrs. Goodyear plays a concertina for this. 'We begin at about two o'clock in the afternoon,' she says, ' and I always swear to myself I'll go home at eight o'clock. But I always stay until closing time.'

It is 12.30. The pickets must already have taken their place in front of the pub. Goodyear rounds a last corner and stands still as if in shock. She beholds scenes that have not met her eyes for 132 days. The boycotters are in the local, they are holding full glasses in their hands, and rejoicing resounds through the open windows. A man in a green jumper comes out and says, 'The brewery has just given in. Our beer is already standing in the cellar. If all goes well, we can drink the first pint at the end of next week. Hurrah!'

Mrs. Goodyear is silent and rushes over the threshold. Dread grips her that all may not be as it was. In the games room, next to the dartboard, there still hangs the notice which warns: 'Anybody using their mobile phone in the pub must buy a round for everyone'. In front of the bar, four rockers in their black jackets are still sitting. They were the only ones who didn't take part in the boycott. Because the disputed beer won't be ready for a week, Mrs. Goodyear orders herself an apple juice.

She stands outside in the sunshine and says it feels like being able to crawl under your own bedclothes after a long journey. One of the rockers towers in front of her. His name is Vik.

Vik has a long grey beard and a tattoo of a scorpion on his arm. He tilts his massive noddle. Then he says, 'Sorry.' He regrets that he boycotted the strike and not the pub.

Mrs. Goodyear is moved, as in runs Mick, film-maker and drummer of the house band The Coils. Mick is holding his mobile phone up in the air. He has had a text message from Steve, a pilot with British Airways. Steve has just taken off from Spain and texted, 'Have heard the good news – see you in the Lewes Arms tonight'.

For a long couple of seconds it seems that the little pub is bigger than the whole world.

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 15 May 07 - 05:30 AM

Andrew - the songbook is great. Now I'll know what I'm singing when I sing along with Pennbucky.

Valmai - congratulations!

sandra

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: SussexCarole
Date: 15 May 07 - 04:32 PM

Great article Valmai - The Lewes Arms does it again! Can't wait to come back & next time we'll be drinking Harveys rather than soda water.

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: MMario
Date: 15 May 07 - 04:42 PM

I missed the songbook first time I looked at this. How could that have happenned?

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: RTim
Date: 15 May 07 - 04:46 PM

My dad was a Cranedriver - In Southampton Docks!

Tim Radford

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Crane Driver
Date: 15 May 07 - 04:57 PM

It wasn't there the first time you looked, Mmario. It's a new feature!

Enjoy

Andrew

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: skipy
Date: 19 Jun 07 - 05:53 PM

Oh my God, we are on the photos!
Skipy.
Proud to be really, what a great day for really GREAT people, love them!

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: skipy
Date: 19 Jun 07 - 06:12 PM

"with me Billy Cox? hat
& silken waistcoat we jumped the brush on 2 months pay (ish)
Skipy.
The great Nick Dow, knows it.

Subject: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Joe Offer
Date: 19 Jun 07 - 06:29 PM

I moved all the messages to this new thread because the other thread was attracting Spam.

Now, the Songbook is very nice, but I'm a little disappointed that there is no page for songs that begin with "R" and "S." I wanted to be sure I correctly understood all the words for "Shirley's Little Sunburnt Spot"....
The song was written by John "Mitch" Mitchell, so I'm surmising that Andrew and Carole didn't get permission to post it on their Website.
-Joe-

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: skipy
Date: 19 Jun 07 - 06:38 PM

Well done Joe!
Skipy

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Crane Driver
Date: 19 Jun 07 - 07:56 PM

Quite right Joe - the songbook is just of songs we've written between us, not other people's songs we've recorded. I'm sure we can let you have the words to 'Shirley' though.

And thanks for dealing with the spam - though I heard it was offering 'sexy swimsuit models', which gives a whole new slant to the picture on the home page!

Andrew

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Leadfingers
Date: 19 Jun 07 - 08:34 PM

I am not sure wether I should complain , or rejoice tat i dont feature in the piccies ! Perhaps I should have made more effort to get down there , rather than earning money ! LOL

Subject: RE: Crane Drivin' Music - the website
From: Bentley
Date: 20 Jun 07 - 12:16 AM

Congratulations on an excellent site. Just an idea though,I've been making available recordings on USB sticks.Cheaper and quicker than CD's and the user can burn if required.