Nowhere near as spectacular as Saint Patrick’s day in Birmingham earlier this year, I saw on the King Billy’s facebook page that they had invited a morris team to dance on Saint George’s day at their pub in Northampton and they claimed that the morris team would be dancing to death metal. I thought that this had to be seen to be believed…..
I also thought it would make a change to get images of another team, as I normally see the Royal Oak Morris as they are more local – Northampton being about 20 miles away, but I decided to combine it with a day shopping in the county town.
On arrival in Northampton, I saw the team having tea at All Saints (most unusual…. our local team usually have a pint in their hand), and walked from the town centre down to the Billy – followed by the clogs of the morris team.
Dancing to death metal was, of course, a joke, but it was very interesting to see a different team, particularly as they had a large band of musicians with them. They were offered the choice of performing in the pubs beer garden, but chose instead to perform in the shade (wise choice, it was a very hot day) at the front of the pub.
Looking back, I should really have positioned myself on the other side of the road to avoid shooting from shade into bright sunlight, so some of the images either have traffic or signs behind them.
You don’t always notice everything that’s in the background when you take your shots: I like the puzzled look of the out of focus lady who was passing by the postbox in the first image, and I hadn’t noticed the telephone box behind the uplifted boot in the second image.
The third image shows several members of the team in mid hop, and the fourth shows several members of the band. There were actually 6 or 7 musicians, but unfortunately I didn’t get a clear shot of them all together.
Finally, my personal favourite, although it is a small image as it’s been heavily cropped:
