Trott Road, Hamilton.

A one-night-only extravaganza of salt-tinged songs provided a fitting end to the Folk Club's Spring Folk Festival.

Singer/songwriter/musician Connolly and musician Sumner put on a superb show, heavily laced with a wit as spicy as Gosling's Black Seal Rum.

The two -- from the once-upon-a-time major British fishing port of Grimsby -- not surprisingly specialise in songs of the sea.

And they trawled up a host of gems throughout the evening, from the old to the newly-minted.

But -- amidst the jokes -- there were a few poignant reminders of the price of fish.

Three Score and Ten, written to raise funds for the families of 70 "boys and men'' from Grimsby alone who lost their lives in a massive storm in the 1880s, was a haunting footnote in the history of men who battle the sea.

And the Lumper's Life -- about the men who had the dangerous job of unloading tons of fish on the dockside, plus a song about the women who braided nets by hand in the days before synthetic polypropylene, showed it wasn't all fun on shore, either.

But the dangers of the fisherman's life also has its funny side, as witnessed by the tale of Harry Hawkins -- the most accident-prone seaman since the Titanic's Captain Smith and the world's first bionic fisherman.

Young Harry starts with the loss of an ear, replaced by electronic parts so efficient, the skipper dumps the hi-tech echo sounder overboard.

And -- after a catalogue of disasters -- Harry finds his popularity with women rockets after a particularly nasty accident forces doctors to provide him with "the first atomic-powered wedding tackle'' in history.

Britain's history of bawdy seaside postcards -- pioneered by Donald McGill -- also rated a mention, in the ukelele-strumming style of old-time music hall star George Formby.

And no show involving Conolly would be complete without the classics Fiddler's Green and Punch and Judy Man, covered by a host of major artists.

The first is a rollicking sea shanty, so authentic you can taste the salt and smell the pitch caulking of an old-style trawler.

And the second is an elegy for lost youth and the changing face of the British holiday as cheap package holidays to Spain edged out the home-grown resorts.

The trawlerman's Requiem also lamented the end of an era -- a UK fishing industry sunk by bureaucrats indifferent to the damage inflicted on entire communities.

And the Bucket and Shovel Brigade -- a swing at the quasi-Reaganomics of 1980s British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher -- tells what happened to redundant fishermen -- not so much the scrapheap as the dungheap, with one lamenting the end of his sea-going days as he shovels sewage in a treatment plant.

But the two unerringly strike the right note and provide a nice balance between poignancy and pungency.

With a festival which has seen the likes of Fairport Convention, Acoustic Nuisance and Annie Clark brought to Bermuda, Conolly and Sumner certainly didn't disgrace themselves in such all-star company.

Earlier, home-grown talent Chris Broadhurst -- original member of the Not the Um Um Show -- took his pen to classics like Dream and turned it into Bream, which wove the names of an entire shoal of fish into a hilarious whine about a diner who only gets bream.

And The Italian Waiters Song -- a medley of Island restaurants with a Mediterranean flavour set to a traditional Italian tune -- takes a dig at the ubiquitous pasta 'n' pizza on the Island with the chorus "we lose the World Cup, so we're taking over you''.

Roll on next Spring.

RAYMOND HAINEY ENTERTAINMENT REVIEW REV ENTERTAINERS ENT