Fabulous Red Diesel in action

Samhain ‘Day of the Dead’ with Fabulous Red Diesel

The Fabulous Red Diesel are celebrating the Day of the Dead at The Beacon on Friday 1 November, starting at 6pm. You’re invited to dress up and come along to enjoy the fun and the great music. HOT’s Zelly Restorick spoke to Kat Lee Ryan about what will be happening?

“For us”, said Kat, “it will be a day to celebrate the thinness of the veil between this world and the next, very much like Halloween in fact. Also a chance to celebrate souls who have passed, by feasting and dancing and fire.

“It is also a chance to celebrate ‘Samhain’, which is a Gaelic word that refers to an ancient Celtic festival that marks the end of summer, the harvest season and the beginning of winter. It was also the start of the Celtic New Year. The word “Samhain” is pronounced “sow-win”.

“We will have a bonfire, fireworks, a very special pagan reverend to open the show – the Reverend Samuel Hayne ! He is the badly behaved hedge priest, who actually performed my hand-fasting with Wil.

“We have Hanna Dennard as a special guest doing a solo set (she is also in “Message from the Ravens”).

“We will have a prize or two for the best fancy dress.  Last time, the standard was very high  — so dress to impress! Our theme is Day of the Dead, which is basically skulls and flowers, or however you want to interpret it! “Bring your dead to the dance!”. And it’s probably a good idea to be honest in that it’s a Halloween party, but trying to go a bit darker, especially with costumes!

Samhain Party

“There will be two sets from The Fabulous Red Diesel, the first is all about death, and transformation,  downtempo and psychedelic, not what you would normally expect from us, although fans of our performance, Sparkly Bird will know what I mean.

“The second set will be uptempo, raucous mischievous and all of the things you normally expect from us .

“We will have our ‘all souls’ tree where we can celebrate our own dead loved ones. It’s simply a star where you can write the name of your person and hang it in the tree, so they are kind of at the party with you.

“How to describe our sound? Tricky question . . .  it’s jazz, but not jazz as we know it; soulful, but not just soul; rather a musical smorgasbord with heavenly vocals, zog trumpets, skin- tight rhythm section and of course it absolutely will contain tuba.

“We’ve had a busy year at Cheltenham Jazz, Boomtown, Good Vibrations, Brecon Jazz Festival, Tribal Earth,  Small World and Monkey Music  — and that’s just the festivals !

“Future news? Hopefully we will  have an official bootleg out in time for Christmas, recorded at The Beacon, and after that we are recording our new studio album , hopefully out next May! Also we will be doing a New Year’s Eve party at The Beacon: watch our website for details.”

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