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Goodnight Robin  Voodoo Daddy's Showroom Monthly Open Mic 24th March 2026 The stage is set. The monthly open mic evening hosted by Voodoo Daddy’s Showroom is a musical institution that was started by Robin Evans pre-pandemic.     The show was promptly reconstituted as soon as possible after the air had cleared and has since become the event that puts the ‘vital’ into the vitality of Norwich’s music scene.     The setting, (both when upstairs on Timber Hill and now in the basement of Voodoo’s on London Street), is sound engineered, lit and takes place on a now legendary local stage.  Its scale and format, the unfailing regularity of the open mic, has led it to become a place where innumerable local musicians gather and mingle each month.  It has been at this open mic many of them have stepped a public stage for the first nerve-tingling time. They try out newly acquired instruments, test new material live, or just come to support and meet their fe...

The Ice House Is Cool Again The Ice House in Great Yarmouth was once the most important building in the port, home to an immense herring fleet.  The Ice House enabled a voracious fishing fleet to operate.  It would have been the grease in the axle of a wheel of the industry, providing the ice for packing for fresh fish, enabling the catch to be transported to London and eastern Europe, where herring was much in demand.  Once a port serving close to a thousand boats, with all the ancillary work that thrived in its wake, Great Yarmouth was a prosperous town, employing all of its men, women and most of the able children in employment.  The critical importance of this ice house, prior to the invention of electric-powered freezers, must not be under-estimated.   Located on the seaward side of Haven Bridge, the Ice House was accessible to all boats, unrestricted by the ancient river crossing.  The building is just a brisk five-minute wa...

New Single Proper Job on the divided state of Creative Britain   When The Clash recorded Career Opportunities for their first album, (when I was a teenager), my mates and I all knew what they were shouting about.  Unemployment was on its way past the three million mark, thanks to the implementation of Thatcher’s neo-liberal Chicago School of Economics shock doctrine experiment.   Nearly fifty years later, (yes, fifty years) the career opportunities have been re-shaped following another ten years of Tory misguided and divisive austerity policies.  Career opportunities are still not knocking and jobs are definitely only being offered for no much better reason than to keep youngsters off the dole, as Job Seekers’ Allowance was previously known colloquially.  So, bravo  Micko and The Mellotronics who are drawing attention to the increasing gap between the haves and have nots in the music and arts world in their new single ‘Proper Job’ released ...