I thought this story of a pub landlord in the U.K deserved wider attention since it’s not only a very positive community activity in an era that seems to be sadly lacking in community spirit and, equally, it’s just plain fun. I hope it gives other pub and bar landlords/owners similar ideas for fomenting their communities’ development.
David Danby, who runs “The Vine” in Tutbury, Staffordshire, is fundraising for the Midlands Air Ambulance Service with his band “Last of the Summer Vines”. He is preparing for a pub crawl with a difference, when he visits 14 venues for 14 gigs over two days. Making their live debut, the band will play half-hour gigs at a different pub every hour, on-the-hour, between 14:00 and 20:00 BST on Saturday and Sunday.
For those not too familiar with traditional BBC TV programming, the name of Danby’s band is a “take” on the long-running series called “Last of the Summer Wine”, which is about a small village in Yorkshire where a group of old, nicely-degenerate, men deliberately get themselves into all sorts of trouble because they have nothing better to do with their final years. The series, which ran for 31 years with 295 episodes, is completely irreverent and funny in the traditional “English-humour” sense. The idea of a pub band that reflects, I assume, the characters in that series, brings a smile to my face just reading about it.
Last of the Summer Wine Characters
“We just thought, let’s raise a bit more funds for the charity that runs the air ambulance service, and let’s do it in a really, really, good enjoyable way,” Danby said. He added: “Air ambulances perform a major, massive, massive role as everyone knows.”
I should also add here that many Air Ambulance Services in the U.K., like the lifeboat services, are run by charities and not government structures or commercial operations – Prince William flew air ambulance helicopters for many years.
The band, which has been together for about five months, will be “strumming very hard and very loud” Danby said. “The songs of The Kinks, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Status Quo and Neil Diamond among those on the set list. We’ve always had live music in all the pubs that we’ve done, me and my wife, but this is the very first time I’ve done my own live thing. I’ve done lots of open-mic nights, but this is the first time I’ve assembled a band together.”
All of the pubs are in, or near, Burton-on-Trent, with about 10 to 15 minutes travel time between each, he added. The tour will start and finish at The Vine, with buckets for loose change in each pub.
This idea of David Danby brings back memories of another charitable event, which I participated in many years ago as part of “Rag Week” at university in England; that is, doing fun things to raise money for charity.
I should explain that “Rag Week” is held at most English universities once a year and provides the students with an excuse to perform many incredible, stupid, fun, borderline illegal, stunts, all designed to raise money for charity. The particular memory that David Danby evoked involved a stretcher race down a main street in Brighton – four students carrying the stretcher and one on it. The street contained ten pubs in a stretch of just over a mile. All participants had to drink half a pint of beer at each pub, then change the person on the stretcher after each drink. The winner of the race of about 15 stretchers was the first team in the fountain in the Strand, at the bottom end of the street. Other students with buckets collected money from the people watching this crazy spectacle. I still remember it well, and smile, over sixty years later!
