The lovely accordionist, Zoe Wang, has, it seems, been cultivating her interest in Celtic music. She's now put together a group of like-minded Chinese musicians (guitar, fiddle, bodhran - and I'm told they have a tin whistle-player too, though absent on this occasion) to play traditional Irish and Scots folk tunes - the ideal bar music. They've been playing together for a while now, but I think Wednesday's performance at Salud might have been their first public appearance (the first that I've seen advertised anyway; they might have been doing a few stealth jams at places like Jianghu).
Indeed, it was at Jianghu just before Christmas last year that I first heard Zoe and her boyfriend play The Pogues' A Rainy Night In Soho. I got even more emotional during yesterday's show at Salud (where Rainy Night had apparently been the first song of their set, and I managed to miss it; but they did it again as an encore - just for me!), dreadful Plastic Paddy that I am sometimes. There's something wonderfully desolate about this music, with its themes of colonial oppression and lost love and inescapable doom - it somehow sings the cold and damp of windswept moors into your bones. On this occasion, there was a further overlay of nostalgia for me, because they played The Belle Of Belfast City - one of the tunes that Scottish folk trio Yard Of Ale always plays during their week-long residency at The Guildford Arms in Edinburgh, during the Festival in August (one of my favourite bars, one of my favourite musical evenings, one of my favourite cities, one of my favourite events - I really, really miss not having made it there this year).
More on The Guildford, perhaps, on another occasion.
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