Welcome to Whipstaff
Text Box: WHIPSTAFF is an amateur folk-based acoustic duo comprising husband and wife, Pete and Jools Thompson. Based in the tiny, historic village of Wressle, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, we perform our own arrangements of traditional material and original self-penned songs. The name comes from our lurcher, Susie, a mixture of whippet and Staffordshire bull terrier, who often provides ‘dog in the background’ sound effects. The vocals are a curious combination of Jools’s pure, clear alto and Pete’s gravelly, unruly baritone, backed by unpredictable accompaniment on guitar, mandolin, cittern, and tin whistle. The term we’ve coined for what we do is ‘Ruffian Music’ - songs with soil under their fingernails that follow the centuries-old tradition of writing ‘for lewed men that luitel connen’. These are the kind of songs that might have wafted upwards with the wood-smoke in a gypsy camp, mingled with the laughter and beer fumes of a nicotine-stained public bar, or been whistled by a clay-booted ploughman as he strained to keep a straight furrow behind a pair of sweating Clydesdales. The themes of many of the songs that we write are rooted in the history, myth, legends and events of Pete’s native East Riding and conjure up images of its unique and diverse landscape of wave-lashed coast, rolling Wolds with picturesque villages nestling in the folds, broad skies, mighty rivers, and ancient sites and ruins – some of which have been places of power for over 4000 years. The songs reflect the lives of the people who have inhabited this relatively unknown corner of England over the centuries - fishermen and poachers, farmers and whalers, noblemen and beggars. Be prepared for an eclectic, earthy, and often dark and mystical collection that brings together storms, shipwrecks, battles, deaths, hauntings and encounters with fairies – woven into a colourful tapestry with the hills, cliffs and fields of East

You can listen to us here:

http://www.youtube.com/my_videos?feature=mhee

 

http://www.reverbnation.com/#!/whipstaff

 

All songs ©Pete Thompson

www.peteratwressle@aol.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.”

 

From ‘We Are the Music Makers’

By Arthur O’Shaughnessy

 

“Our relatively new friends Jools and Pete who together make up Whipstaff – not Whiplash as advertised – then produced a superb traditional set for us.  With Pete demonstrating some brilliant guitar technique and Jools providing some lovely vocals they held the audience superbly.”

Review of Acoustic Rotherham 8.
Text Box: “Give me the makings of the songs of the people—I care not who makes their laws!”