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Most of you local soulies will definitely know Peanuts and Karen Ward who were (and hopefully soon will be again) well known faces on the Northern Soul scene from the early seventies and have been really good friends of mine over that time. They have drifted in and out of the scene since then and are about to make another return with a visit to our St Ives Charity night this year. I have recently been in touch with these two wonderful people again after a few years of only the occasional "bump into syndrome" and as I mentioned above; I have succeeded in persuading them to grace the wooden floors of St Ives at our Charity bash on the 20th of October once more along with a load of other former and Present members of the Cambridgeshire soul Crew who they are hopefully going to drag along with them. The 2 hours I spent round their house on Sunday the 16th September were 2 of the most enjoyable hours I have had for a long time (apart from the England Germany game of course) sorry I had to spoil it with that comment girls; but I am a typical bloke after all. Apart from the lovely cup of tea Karen made me of which I had to have reheated because I let it go cold, they proceeded to bombard me with the greatest nostalgic music and photo feast I have consumed in years, their CD collection was bursting off the homemade unit that peanuts had made and was beckoning for us to play some of them, which we did. Peanuts sat there in his chair with the remote control of their CD player and thundered through some of the greatest Motown and Northern soul songs I have heard for years; with most of them consisting of rare versions and some tracks I had previously unheard. Karen also proceeded to amaze me with the wad of photographs and memorabilia of the old gang of whom I have not set eyes on for years and some who I honestly forgot even existed at all; I am ashamed to say. One picture which Karen presented to me did bring a tear to my eye was a photo of "Skip" and me [right] discussing a record on the podium at the Howard Mallett club, those of you that knew Skip will remember him as being one of the nicest guys you could meet and whom unfortunately was taken from us quite a few years ago now. Well I have decided to dedicate these two pages to Peanuts and Karen whom I now know have just discovered the internet at last, I am going to put all the photo's I can get on the page and a selection of their fave records to play along with their e-mail address if you would like to get hold of them. I do hope you enjoy these pages and I would love to hear from anyone who is in the photo's also anyone that knows what happened to or the whereabouts of any of the people in the photo's. There are loads of great characters in these photo's, many of whom I have not seen for years and unfortunately because of my memory being the equivalent to a very absent minded goldfish I cannot remember some of their names. I do hope they are not offended by this but I have never been very good at names anyway but I always seem to remember faces. Can you remind me of some of the names; Or Indeed if you are one of the people in the picture yourself then please e-mail me and I will add them to the list. |
Peanuts and karen then;
& more recently
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Skip and myself discussing a record at the Howard Mallett. |
