The Servants' Ball

This exuberantly entertaining album came about after double bass player Ben Nicholls, reading about Sussex concertina player Scan Thester, found a 1930s village hall dance band's set list. It was surprisingly eclectic: country dance tunes, ragtime, even light classical music. Free from worries about authenticity or appropriation, Thester's Imperial Band played whatever took their fancy and might get them another booking.

Intrigued, Nicholls got The Servants' Ball together: Leveret's concertina player Rob Harbron, banjolele-playing step dancer Ewan Wardrop, fiddler Ben Paley, percussionist Evan Jenkins, and pianist Julian Hinton. Someone plays slide whistle, but no one's owning up. They researched at the Museum of English Rural Life and the British Museum, coming up with an album representing the evening's entertainment at the kind of dances Thester played. There's music hall songs (‘The Bird on Nelly's Hat’, saucy), tunes to get you moving such as ‘Les Rats Quadrille’, composed by Gervasius Redler for student dancers (les petits rats) of the Paris Opera Ballet in the 1840s; the ‘Wild West Gallop’ and Thester's own ‘Pretty Little Dear’. There was an Egyptology craze so the album begins with ‘Egyptian Princess’ and there's the ‘Sultan Polka’, known now only as the tune for that environmentally sensitive nursery rhyme about catching a fish, then releasing it. It concludes with a bizarre version of ‘Old King Cole’. His fiddlers three are a classy trio indeed – Paganini, Spagnoletti and Mori. Wonderful.