Nursery Cryme at The Oak

Nursery Cryme are obviously doing something right.

When I saw them play at The Oak in July the fans were enthusiastic but not that numerous and I our group of five easily got good seats at the music end of the bar. This time the place was packed and the best two of us could do was grab the final stool at the beer end of the bar, where we could hear but not see the band, for the first half and then stand at the far edge of the music end for the second half.

Those two halves were long halves too with Nursery Cryme playing from 8:30 to 9:30 and then from 10:00 to 11:00.

The Oak played its part too. I have had unfavourable experiences with their beer in the past but I had no complaints this night. They had four bitters on with a genuine choice to make (and something I would not dream of touching). I settled for the Adnams Southwold and that proved to be a good choice and one I repeated a couple of times over the evening.

Having seen Nursery Cryme twice before I had a good idea of what to expect though there were some new songs, including one from Wind and Wuthering (1976) which we referred to as Wuth and Windering at university for reasons that made sense at the time. My roommate and I also recorded a version of Your Own Special Way which was called Your Own Obvious Way and was dedicated to Mr Obvious who won that nickname for standing next to the pinball table (Big Ben) and saying obvious things. One lyric that I recall was, "I'm almost there my score's 53, He tells me I just need a G".

Nursery Cryme also seemed to have done a little on their presentation with the lead singer dressed all in white and everybody else all in black. Note a massive change but a noticeable one and it helped.

The Nursery Cryme mission is to play early Genesis songs as they were originally recorded and that requires skillful musicianship in all departments, which they have, and part of the joy in watching them perform is seeing the way that they play together and flourish individually. They play (generally) long complex songs to people who appreciate that sort of thing, not everybody does but those who do had a great time. And the growing following that they have quickly established shows that there are lots of fans for this sort of music played this well.

Nursery Cryme are obviously doing something right.