Loes & The Celtic Link from Prague to Westport (and Back) #6: Midsummer Dreams

Life’s a walk on the beach, innit?

Those who have read all my tour reports so far may think that Honza and I are obsessed with the beach: after Poole (UK) and Lahinch (Ireland), you will now see photos of Penmaenmawr (Wales) and Oostende (Belgium). Not that we spent our days sipping cocktails under an umbrella – there were miles to be made and gigs to be played, and besides, I already get sunburned merely thinking about the beach. But let's face it: if you are nearby and you can spare a moment, the call of the sea is very strong!

Outbound, we had taken the ferry from Liverpool to Belfast; for the way back the choice was Dublin-Holyhead. The road from Holyhead to Birmingham, where I had booked an overnight stay, was breathtakingly beautiful and it just didn't stop! First, we drove from Holyhead across the Anglesey peninsula to the town with the incredibly Welsh name Llanfairpwllgwyngyll (yep, try pronouncing that out loud three times with a biscuit in your mouth), already seeing the peaks of Eryri National Park (a.k.a. Snowdonia) looming in the distance. From there you can choose several routes to the southeast; we drove along the coast toward Liverpool and then through Stoke-on-Trent to Birmingham. In the small town of Penmaenmawr, we stopped briefly to take photos and promised to each other and to Wales that we would return.

Waving from such great heights

The next day, like American tourists "doing Europe", we tried to cram as many experiences into as little time as possible: a morning stroll through Birmingham (which I enjoyed, because it reminded me of Rotterdam), lunch in university town Oxford and a visit to an old college friend who lives near London. This reunion after 15 years, with the three of us playing some songs on the couch in the evening, was one of the highlights of this trip for me, personally – and the song !Such Great Heights" by The Postal Service will be stored in my memory as its soundtrack.

The next day, we had a coffee with a stewardess from Houston, Texas. Over a year ago, she had found my book High Lonesome Below Sea Level: Faces and Stories of Bluegrass Music in the Netherlands in a swap box in an Amsterdam hotel and she was eager to buy some more copies from me. She flies regularly to London, so I thought it would be nice to hand her the books in person. It was a lovely meeting and it's always nice to have someone genuinely interested in this book I made with photographer Marieke Odekerken in 2015 as a result of my Master's thesis on the Dutch bluegrass community.

Whereas at the time I made it as a snapshot, a more or less random cross-section of people who felt connected to bluegrass in the Netherlands at that time, now – 10 years later – it's all history. Bands and relationships have broken up, people have emigrated or died. On the same day that four books found their way into a suitcase bound for Texas, I was told that one of the people portrayed in the book, Joris Scheepers, had died at the age of 50 after a long illness. He was the lead singer of Velvet Joe & The Bluegrass Diamonds, he was dearly loved and will be missed.

A beach and a fairy tale town

On the ferry from Dover to Dunkirk, Honza entertained himself by photographing the White Cliffs of Dover while I was working on a tour report; my weekly race against time! Since neither of us had ever been to the Belgian coast, I booked an overnight stay in Oostende – also as a nod to "Ostende" in Třebon, southern Bohemia, which we visited in 2021 on our musical bike tour with Jan Řepka & Bájsykl Band. The Czech Republic may not have a sea, but it has many beautiful fishing and swimming ponds with "beaches". The beach area around Svět swimming pond was inspired by and named after Oostende. I didn't see many similarities at first glance, but I think there is a little more history behind it, which perhaps the movie Rozmarné léto also has something to do with....

When we were in Bulgaria in 2024 with the Present-Day Troubadours tour, we had driven all the way from Sofia to Burgas only to jump back into the car after 15 minutes of free time on the beach. So two hours on the beach in Belgium felt like luxury to us and left us enough time afterwards to also explore the medieval town of Bruges. On the Grote Markt, at the foot of the Belfry Tower, I asked Honza if he had seen the movie In Bruges. He wasn't sure, to which I said, "If this tower doesn't look familiar to you, then you haven't seen the movie." So we watched the movie together a few days later, and I couldn't get the song "On Raglan Road" (which plays during the most impressive scene in the movie) out of my head for the rest of the week.

Many hands make light work: the restoration of Casino van Gompel

If you can still be impressed by a building right after visiting fairytale Bruges, it must be a damn fine piece of architecture. First of all, Casino van Gompel was surprising because it is not full of blackjack tables and slot machines, but is a 1925 Art Deco-style building that originally served as a meeting place and cultural center for the employees of the Glaverbel Glass Factory.

The neglected building had lapsed into squalor until Lawrence De Belder bought it in 2019 and, with the help of volunteers, renovated it over 6 years. The renovation is true to the original style and the operation (which includes organic food from its own vegetable garden) is inspired by Villa Augustus in Dordrecht, a place Honza and I also love to visit. Casino van Gompel has a large room and a more intimate small room that we played in. We had some nice conversations afterwards with people who also make music or organize events themselves and with a Slovak who has lived half his life in Belgium. The next morning we listened to the experiences of the volunteers from Argentina, Mexico and Chicago, who signed up for this project through the app Worldpackers. For them, this is the ideal way to travel, meet people and learn useful new skills. An inspiring lifestyle!

"Tell me, what have you been up to over the past twenty years?"

After Mol, we had another two days off to visit family and friends. We made a stop in Nijmegen, where I studied in another lifetime (2000-2004). It was very special to meet Mariska Petrovic again after 20 years and sing some songs together. In the period 2005-06, I briefly but intensively sang with her as a duo Waterfly and as part of the Dutch-Slovakian bluegrass band Waterflow. Without Mariska I wouldn't have gone to the European World of Bluegrass Festival in Voorthuizen in 2005, I might never have heard of bluegrass, I wouldn't have ended up in a band with Slovaks, I certainly wouldn't have emigrated to the Czech Republic and so my life would have been totally different!

Midsummer celebration among ghetto blasters: live and let live

On May 28, while Honza and I were in England, I received a message: "Hi Loes, how are you? Maybe you remember me from some years ago, when I went to see Red Herring perform from time to time. I was looking for an artist for June 21, in Rotterdam. Are you available?" The writer of the message wanted to organize an informal midsummer celebration on the beach of the swimming pond Kralingse Plas. The likelihood that I would be at that exact spot on that exact day, and also have that evening free, might be million-to-one... but, as Terry Pratchett wrote in the Discworld book Mort: "magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten."

"Midsommar", a pagan Germanic custom to celebrate the longest day of the year, is not something the average European outside Scandinavia would mark in their calendars. In the Celtic community in the Czech Republic, Beltane and Samhain are celebrated (respectively ushering in summer and winter), but I had never experienced a midsummer celebration myself. When we arrived on the longest (and perhaps warmest) day of the year at the spot where a group of people were decorating the May pole, we were a bit skeptical at first: this beach and the field behind it are popular spots for Rotterdam locals to barbecue and turn up the ghetto blaster nice and loud. And what pops out of the speakers is of a completely different genre than our Irish tunes. I feared there would be a loudness war – which we would lose – but we ended up all perfectly capable to share the public space. There were even some curious people who wandered in attracted by our music or the ritual where participants recite a good intention and then take a leap over the bonfire.

Performing before us was the very versatile artist Stephanie Lehmann, whom I recognized from the time I lived, studied and worked in Rotterdam (from 2004-2018). She graduated in Pop and Indian Singing and in her performances she combines her singing technique and improvisational talent with her love of circus and nature. After hours of digging in our memories, we found out what our connection was: in 2012, we both collaborated on the extraordinary album Résonance by Tanah Broadcast aka Ferdy Karto.

Is this the end, my beautiful friend?

I will save two more stories for the next and final tour report: about our performances on June 22 at De Melkbus in Dordrecht and June 23 at Camping 't Rouweelse Veld in Kronenberg. Furthermore, Honza will be performing with his balfolk band BaLLaB in Erlangen on June 26 and we are planning a visit to the musician town of Markneukirchen. And who knows, maybe something unexpected will still come our way....

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