Sunjay Brayne Feature Night – 2nd December

Sunjay Brayne

Well, where do I begin? What a fabulous evening of entertainment we had on Friday at our latest meeting. The quality and variety of performances continues to astound but we’ve still got our much valued warm environment where new performer’s feel welcome to make a debut.

Our feature spot was performed by BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award finalist Sunjay Brayne. This is a young man with an extraordinary talent. He is an amazing guitarist with a great singing voice and a very engaging personality. His fingers flew around the fretboard but this was no flashy guitar exhibition, it was a full and rounded performance which was thoroughly enjoyed by everyone. There is no doubt that Sunjay has something a bit special and the potential to go a long way in his musical career. We will all be watching for the results of the award in February.

Whilst Sunjay was the stand out performer of the evening there was much more going on too! The first half included some fine songs and a few good laughs from Pete, stories from Finbar and an excellent debut performance from Laura. What a great voice.

Roger (Sunjay’s dad) did a great spot including a Fred Wedlock song that took me back to my early days in Bristol. Ed was then accompanied by Maeve who played flute beautifully invoking a collective warm sigh around the room. Lovely stuff.

Dave Fry ended the first half in great style including a fine performance of Galway to Graceland that perfectly captured that balance of sadness and humour so brilliantly crafted into the song.

And so to the raffle …

I have always thought that a raffle was a purely random mechanism but I am now beginning to think that there is some dark art around buying raffle tickets that three of our members are becoming expert at! We haven’t seen Derek and Tess for a few weeks but their return was immediately celebrated by Derek swooping to claim the mulled wine donated by Ray. How does he do it? Marten, who is now established as apprentice raffle expert, continued his fine run of form by adding the jelly beans to his growing collection of chocolates and Christmas decorations. But, the undisputed king of the raffle, Julian, was about to strike once again! The penultimate Christmas prize was revealed in all of its glory to be a magnificent Christmas tree hat complete with flashing Christmas lights and modeled by Sue B. Julian proudly took both his wife and the hat home to add to the inflatable snowman won last time. No, really, how does he do it?!!

Sunjay started the second half with a brilliant 30 minute spot. It was a big ask for Diane to “follow that” but she pulled it off with two
fine songs. Marten gave us another fine slice of his poetry and Susan sang a lovely, humorous song. There had been several reference to my Dougie spot during the evening and Dave returned to answer all the talk about “that Maclean character” with a great performance of American Pie! With everyone singing so loud Dave barely needed to join in himself!

The evening was all but over but we could not let Sunjay go without an encore performance to finish the night. I managed to resist saying this all
night but I can’t stop myself any more … Sunjay Brayne – remember that name!