I was very pleased to visit Hitchin Folk Club for the first time. The forty-five-year-old club has a reputation as being a particularly good one. It won the Radio Two Folk Club Of The Year Award in 2005, and consistently boasts an impressive list of top-quality visiting acts.

The central of Hitchin is actually rather attractive, much of it pre-nineteenth century. Right in the middle is the rather magnificent Sun Hotel, a former coaching inn built in the sixteenth century. The inn has many parts to it: the Folk Club is in the ballroom up the stairs. The room is plush and spacious, by folk club standards, enabling a large audience, by folk club standards, to be comfortably accommodated. All in all the Club has the feel of a thriving, efficient but friendly organisation

The Club goes in for concerts, with a main act and a support, rather than floorspots. The support this evening was singer, songwriter and guitarist, Keith Pearson, sometimes of the bluegrass band Coup de Grass. Keith claims to be the most regular performer at the Club. On his website, he also claimed his banter is ‘curmudgeonly'. What a splendid word, and indeed on tonight's evidence it is indeed an apt description. In between the curmudgeonly banter, his ballads evoke a lost American gentility, possessing a latent charm.

While Keith Pearson's curmudgeonliness is really rather gentle, Wild Willy Barrett's is thoroughly robust. Wild Willy clearly does everything on purely his own unfathomable terms, whilst disdaining everyone else's terms, not excepting those of Mary Holland and John Devine, the other two members of his Sleeping Dogz (Devine looks as if he, also, has lived a bit; Holland looks incongruously genteel.) They have learnt to become stoical in the face of Willy's irascible and unpredictable ways. For instance, Barrett declared his retirement a few times during the show. I don't think he meant it, if only because he told me in the interval that Sleeping Dogz would be back in the Club Tent at Cambridge Folk Festival next year (hurray!). It's not impossible that the stage manner and relationships on display are more rehearsed than it appears, but I really don't think so. All of this might seem somewhat disquieting, but it's actually rather engaging, even fascinating, for anyone with an appetite for the unsmooth and for the thoroughly individual.

The music of Sleeping Dogz matches their personas for idiosyncrasy. More than that, it's bloody brilliant. In fact I'd rate them as among the top ten British bands of today, possibly the top five. All three members are most talented acoustic instrumentalists, performing guitar, banjo, fiddle, cello, harmonium, pipes, whistles and percussion between them.  Their repertoire is quite distinctive. They deliver several delightfully odd mini-epics that are very unfolky in their skewiff grandeur, with more affinity in tone to grandiose psychedelia. These include Gypsies Too, The Emperor's Head (a pub), Tales From The Raj (an Indian restaurant, I presume), and, grandest of all, Milton Keynes, which has something of the feel of an outsider music answer to Stairway To Heaven. Then there's the rousing country jig numbers, such as the delightful Old Joe Coral. And then there's the audience participation numbers, which throw an element of football crowd rowdiness into very odd contexts. Who is this Boris ‘the vodka king', whom we are all celebrating so enthusiastically? Never expect explanations from this band.

Thank you, Hitchin Folk Club, you're doing a most good thing. Thank you, Sleeping Dogz, you're brilliance is wonderfully unique.

Writer: Rychard Carrington