Christmas comes early this year for lovers of green beer.
With doors opening at 6 p.m. on Saturday (March 16), three bands will take to the stage at the Canmore Legion for a St. Patrick’s Day party.
Along with two local acts – Tootsie Gunslinger and The Last Order – headlining the show is King Crow and the Ladies From Hell, a nine-member band from Terrace, B.C.
Lead singer Bobby Middleton spoke on behalf of the troupe.
“I met JP and Tara travelling and they’re fellow musicians I met in New Zealand,” said Middleton, referring to John Paul McBride and Tara Brehaut, members of The Last Order.
“We were all backpacking and we played in a band together for a few months there,” he explained. “It was fun, we played at a bunch of local pubs there, mostly folk music.”
King Crow and the Ladies From Hell are a strange mixture of folk, punk and rock – a little of everything – said Middleton.
“I do the singing for the most part, and play rhythm acoustic, and we’ve got a fiddler, banjo player who also plays guitar sometimes, drummer, bass, another electric guitar player, a girl that sings and plays accordion, and then a couple of other guys that take turns singing,” he said. “There’s a bunch of us, making all kinds of noise.”
The group came together to play a festival two years ago and have stuck together ever since.
“We all knew each other from school years, and we got together to play folk background for an apple fall festival in our hometown, and it was pretty fun because we had so many different instruments,” said Middleton. “Then we decided to play another gig, and it just went from there.”
While they started out playing Celtic folk covers, the band has moved forward with writing original music.
“We’ve got a couple of Irish traditional songs that we do, and then some that we’ve rearranged, but we’re headed on to original stuff now,” said Middleton. “Some songs are Celtic folk and some are more written with a rock ‘n’ roll sound, but comes through folkie because of our instrumentation, so it’s got this weird folk punk sound, but it’s pretty fun, and it’s fun to experiment with so many different instruments.
“We’ve got a piper, we do a couple of tunes with him, the pipes are tricky to play with. It’s got its place, they’re louder than anything else, you never have to amp the bagpipes, but they’re fun. He plays Irish drum and tin whistle as well.”
As for the name of the band, the ladies are anything but hellish, stressed Middleton.
“The ladies in the band are probably the sweetest girls you’ll ever meet,” he said.” If you ask everybody in the band you’ll probably get nine different stories about where the name came from.
“For one of our first gigs we had to come up with a name and didn’t know what to call ourselves. We had this list of names and King Crow was on there and we liked the sound of it, and the Ladies from Hell was a reference to the Scottish regiment in the military, because they had their kilts, and we mashed it together and settled on that. We thought it was ridiculous, and it actually is, but we’re still hanging on to it.”
Their first album, an EP released in mid-January, was followed by a small tour of Alberta. With that under their kilts, the band is now excitedly working toward working on a full-length CD.
“It was a learning experience for a lot of us, and because there’s so many of us, it was a lot of work getting that much sound to go together,” said Middleton. “Putting the sound onto a CD was pretty different for us, but we’re pretty stoked about it and right now we’re going to get going this spring on getting the full-length out.”
Following Saturday’s show in Canmore, the band moves to Calgary for another St. Patrick’s Day show Sunday.
“We’ve got a tendency to get people up and moving,” he said. “We’re really stoked, it’ll be a good weekend for us.”
For more information, visit them online at kingcrowandtheladiesfromhell.com
