It’s the last four months of AUK’s tenth year as the premier online resource for all matters Americana. To mark the occasion there was a tenth birthday bash held in its heartland of Liverpool with a star studded cast of performers playing. We’ll return to that in a little while but first off here’s a shorter than usual rummage on what we were up to in the last quarter of 2011.
It was a busy time for live reviews as we cover Crosby & Nash, Roger McGuinn, Richmond Fontaine, Alejandro Escovedo, Wilco, Steve Earle, Bob Dylan and many others. Most of these reviews are archived and you can read then here.
On the interviews front there are some vintage crackers as AUK writers sit down with the likes of Slaid Cleaves, Tom Russell, Israel Nash Gripka, JT Nero (before Birds Of Chicago), Willy Vlautin, The Jayhawks and Alejandro Escovedo. Again, you should be able to access these here although it is a bit pot luck as some of the links work and some don’t. The Dirty Dozen feature (a questionnaire for acts to fill in and return) is in full swing but for the time being we don’t have any superstars returning our emails.
Just a short mention of the monthly CDs sent out to Friends Of Americana UK as we’re keen to move onto the birthday bash. You can see all the acts included featured in the pictured sleeves, the usual mixture of well and lesser known acts and, as always, they’re all an intriguing listen. There’s a fine reminder of UK band Case Hardin on the September disc which also features Hollywood star Jeff Bridges (the Dude!). We’ll forego our usual trawl through the lesser known acts who stand out (apologies to them now destined to be forever forgotten) but we can’t avoid mentioning the hidden tracks at the end of each disc, chosen by our editor Mark. September’s features another Hollywood star, Billy Bob Thornton, on a very respectable version of ‘He Was A Friend Of Mine’, taken from his debut album “Private Radio”, an album your author will need to check out to see if the rest of it is as good. October delivers the late Elliott Smith singing ‘Between The Bars’ while November’s offering is ‘The Honeymoon Song’ by Everclear, an indie rock band from Portland Oregon. December rounds up the year appropriately enough with the bittersweet ‘That Was The Worst Christmas Ever!’ by Sufjan Stevens.
On Saturday 12th November the AUK tribe descended on Liverpool’s Contemporary Urban Centre for an all day extravaganza, celebrating the tenth anniversary of Americana UK. This wasn’t the first ever event, apparently there was a first birthday celebration called Americana One which featured Bill Malonee, Bap Kennedy, Michael Weston King and Wigan’s Witness. Amazingly enough this event was actually reviewed by The Guardian. Anyhow, for our tenth birthday a stellar line up of UK and American artists helped the event to sell out and, fortunately enough for us, some of it was preserved on video along with a filmed interview with our editor Mark Whitfield. You can see these at the end of the article. 
There was merch. A T-shirt and a strictly limited CD featuring all of the acts who performed that day along with some exclusive live tracks from Richmond Fontaine and Mark Eitzel. All profits were donated to charities. It would be very cool if any of our readers have any memories of the event, if so please feel free to post them in the comments section.
There were plans to repeat the exercise for AUK’s 20th anniversary in 2021 but Covid knocked that on the head. However, as AUK enters its silver jubilee plans are afoot to celebrate that. Wish us luck and stay tuned for news.
The videos here were made by a now-defunct website called Tincanland. They also ran a short review of the day…
You can still be a friend of Americana UK in this digital age, and amazingly, it’s now cheaper to do so than it was in 2011. All details here.
Vintage screenshots grabbed via The Wayback Machine.
Our Mark, waxing eloquently…
And finally, our December Christmas message…
