The Last Song on Market Street

Every October, the jazz musician Idris ends the Hebden Bridge festival in the same building: an old church on Market Street. The church closed in 1998. The music started two years later.

The building has changed. Downstairs, where people once left their coats, there is a bar. The hall upstairs is full of round tables instead of long wooden seats, and the stage stands where the organ used to be. On busy nights the room is so crowded that people sit on the steps at the side.

The concerts have changed too. In the first years, Idris played with two friends and a piano that somebody carried in from a house on the same street. Now he brings a band of seven, and the tickets are gone by September.

One thing does not change. Idris always finishes with the same slow song. He wrote it for that first night in the church, and he has played it at the end of every festival since — never in the middle, never twice.

“People ask me for new songs all year,” he says. “Not on that night.”

The building is not a church any more. The festival is now a series of twelve concerts across the town, in bars, in the library, in a tent by the river. But for the people sitting on the steps, the tradition is not the building. It is the last song.