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COUNTRY JOE McDONALD - at Gosport & Fareham Easter Festival Woodstock and Monterey festival veteran singer, guitarist and activist Country Joe McDonald will be perfoming not one but TWO two rare solo gigs in at The Gosport & Fareham Easter Festival on Easter Sunday, March 27th . Country Joe is in England to perform just four dates, organised by his U.K promoter, John Roberts of the Portsmouth based Barking Spider Promotions. From 1pm to 5pm on Easter Sunday, Country Joe will be headlining the afternoon concert at Ferneham Hall, whlist at at 8pm he'll be performing at The Lysses House Hotel, High St., Fareham, with special guests. Country Joe McDonald straddles the two polar events of the '60s' The Woodstock Festival and the Vietnam War. In fact, such emblematic proportions have obscured his own true talents, but McDonald has found a measure of peace with his own past. "This doesn't mean I'm happy about it," said McDonald, who was not only an anti-war protestor during the '60's but also a Vietnam era Navy veteran. "I remember the trips and I remember the demonstrations. I remember some of it with happiness and I remember some of it with sadness." After 31 albums and more than a quarter century in the public eye as a folksinger, Country Joe McDonald qualifies as one of the best known names from the '60's rock still performing, a thriving, working musician who travels the world and continues to sell records. McDonald released the first Country Joe and the Fish record, containing an agit-prop folk version of "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" in October 1965, in time for the Vietnam Day Teach-In, a massive anti-war protest organized in Berkeley, California. Within months the nascent folk group had exchanged their acoustic instruments for electric, plugged in and were playing the burgeoning San Francisco psychedelic ballroom scene at the Avalon and Fillmore. With the release of "Electric Music for Mind and Body", the band's 1967 debut, Country Joe and the Fish joined the front ranks of the international psychedelic rock movement.The band's second album contained the rock version of "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag", one of the great anthems of the era, with its notorious "Fish Cheer" introduction. The following year, at the Woodstock Arts and Music Festival. McDonald led an audience approaching a half-million in a mass rendition of "The Fish Cheer". After five albums with the band, McDonald began his career as a solo artist in 1969 shortly after Woodstock. His solo recordings have spanned a broad range of styles and content; from his musical rendition of the World War I poems of Robert Service to a straight forward collection of country and western standards, from the 1985 double-record set, "Vietnam Experience", to the 1991 blues outing with guest guitarist Jerry Garcia, "Superstitious Blues." "I like real", McDonald said. "I think it's dangerous, insulting and demeaning not to be real. I am Country Joe. I don't pretend to be Country Joe. I don't have a Country Joe suit in my closet." Last year saw most of Country Joe And The Fish - all but one member of the line-up who recorded the classic albums "Electric Music for Mind and Body",and "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag" - reforming as The Country Joe Band. Barking Spider promoted a U.K summer tour 2004 for the band to great acclaim. This August, Barking Spider are proud to announce that they've organised a longer U.K. tour for The Country Joe Band, including an appearance at The Eastleigh Summer Festival and headlining the opening night of Fairport Conventions' Cropredy Festival. Country Joe McDonald appears at The Gosport & Fareham Easter Festival on Easter Sunday: 1pm - 5pm Ferneham Hall (box office 01329 231942), & 8pm at The Lysses House Hotel, High St., Fareham (01329 822622)