Trowbridge Village Pump Festival

"Seed, bud, flower, fruit -- they're never going to grow without their roots...." 

Show of Hands gigs always feel a bit like revivalist meetings. The less kind prefer the word "rallies". On Saturday night, Steve feels even more like a worship-leader than usual. Throughout the weekend there has been a positively Glastonian sense that the star of the Trowbridge folk festival is the Trowbridge folk festival – that bands have only to say the the word "Trowbridge!" to get a big round of applause. Steve, as ever, encapsulates the moment:

"Branch, stem, shoots...we need roots! We need roots....we need The Trowbridge Village Pump Folk Festival!" 

There is a back story. The 2011 Trowbridge festival (not to be confused with the 2011 Trowbridge festival) was cancelled for the first time since it started in the 1970s, so everyone is keen to maintain that the 2012 Trowbridge festival (not to be confused with the 2012 Trowbridge festival, which was cancelled) has full continuity with the old one, despite being run by different people at different locations. 

The weather is on the new organizers' side. By day, there is sun and blue sky. At night, there are stars. A spotlight from the marquee illuminates the White Horse. The drumming workshop comes out of the tent and finds a home under a tree; people in the bar busk Rock Me Mama Like a South Bound Train. The Bloodstone Border Morris interpolate "My friend Billy had a ten-foot willy!" (which I suspect of not being entirely traditional) into one of their blackface routines, and no-one seems to mind or notice. I buy a slice of Victoria Sponge from the cake stall, and a hat from the hat stall. People get out rugs and camp chairs and drink beer and wine and newspapers and kindles. The music becomes the idyllic backdrop to an English summer picnic.

By Sunday, expressions like "triumphant return" and "feels just like the old one" were drifting across the valley. Earlier in the weekend the word "shambles" was being avoided like one of those elephants that hides in peoples rooms. Show of Hands and the sun (and the cake shop and general niceness) had saved the day...

I wasn't entirely convinced by the arrangements in the main marquee. There was no seating; there was an imaginary line in front of the stage; behind the imaginary line, you could sit on your own camp-chair; in front of the line (hereafter "the mosh") it was standing room only. This meant that those of us with long legs could choose to stand all day, get buffeted by dancers, but actually see what was going on. I wasn't quite clear whether the lady behind me was miming intercourse with a: the crash barrier, b: Steve Knightley or c: Me, but it was not an experience I have had a folk gig before, and not one I would care to have again. Another reveller explained to me after the show that I was a fucking tall bastard, without making it entirely clear what he thought I could do about it. I don't think I am noticeably taller, and certainly not noticeably wider, with a hat (did I mention that I bought a hat?) than I was without. Those who thought to bring camp seats would presumably have got through the weekend without cramp but without actually seeing any of the acts. Since a lot of people knew to bring chairs, this may have been the normal set up at Trowbridge (applause!) But I wish -- in all seriousness -- that festival organisers would put you this kind of thing on the website when you buy tickets. "Bring you own chair.  Bacon sandwich kiosk ten minutes walk from camp site." Things you actually need to know.

The programme bore only a coincidental resemblance to the actual running order, which was fine for people like me who plonked themselves in the mosh at lunchtime and stayed there until the security asked us to leave; but less good for the people who turned up to hear Cara Dillon and found that her act had finished 15 minutes ago. I noticed that the very lovely O'Hooley and Tidow were giving out flyers in the beer tent telling punters what time they were coming on. 

And the PA system was very special. I know literally nothing about this sort of thing. I'd been going to concerts for a year before I realized that the blocky things at the front were what the performers listened to themselves on. Running sound may, for all I know, be like twiddling knobs on a wireless, or more like quantum physics. Quite often, you got to concerts where slightly precious musicians seems to be getting annoyed because the sound isn't just so even though we mortals in the audience didn't quite see a problem. But this weekend, we had guitarists who couldn't go near the mic because of feedback and reverb -- see, I do know some technical words. ("Could we do anything about the feedback on this note? This one? It's "C". We use it a lot. One of the white notes...") We had change-overs so long that there was hardly any time left for acts to actually do their set. (Fay Hield, in the company of Jon Boden, Sam Sweeney and Rob Harbron, barely got to do half an hour.) My impression, which is based, as I say, on complete ignorance, was that the amp worked fine for instruments that plugged into the system directly (the very very electric Oysterband went right through a long set without a hitch) but panicked when attaching itself to acoustic instruments. Seth Lakeman appeared to be rewriting his set on the hoof based on which of his instruments were working at any given moment. Things aren't going well when a performer of this calibre calls into the audience mid-song "Can anyone actually hear my fiddle?"

Show of Hands brought their own cables. 


But Technical Problems (no less than Rain) can create an atmosphere which puts the audience and the band on the same side, having a great time in the face of adversity. In the end, it's the Moments that we take away with us. (Poss. title for song if I ever take up song writing?) Here are some moments I will remember (poss. second line?)

John Jones climbing over the barrier and mingling with the punters during Here Comes the Flood.  I've only previous heard the Oysterband with June Tabor, but they work great by themselves, more like small scale 80s stadium rock than folkies. Jones sings with his hands, gesticulating like a politician, drawing the audience in or thumping the air, making a clenched fist and then a single finger for "all things in common/ all people one"  in the obligatory World Turned Upside Down. ("I give you this song" he says at one point "I give you this song", leaving the audience repeating the refrain for several minutes, before, er, taking it back again. Possibly you had to be there.) The Oysterband are now firmly ensconced in my premier division of performers. No-one in the audience knew the words to "Put Out the Lights". It didn't matter.

(By the way, I committed a calumny, a solipsism and also a booboo the other day, implying that I thought most of what the Oysters do are covers of things which mainstream pop groups have done, largely because I know for a fact that the one with June Tabor  was written by the Velvet Underworld. So I should point out that I now fully believe that I Haven't Prayed Since God Knows When My Teeth Are UnAmerican and  Put Out The Lights, Put Out The Lights, Put Out The Lights on London City are Oysterband originals. And bloody good songs of course)

Luke Jackson singing his poignant coming of age song "The Big Hill". (All Luke Jackson's songs are coming of age songs. The song which he called "Oh Me Oh My" when he sang it in Bristol has been renamed "More Than Boys": it's going to be the title track of his album, which is absolutely spot-on.) The Oxford English Dictionary states that "Luke Jackson completely blew me away" is now a single word, like "England Test collapse". It's the ordinary language rising to the surface of the lyric which breaks my heart every time I hear him.



Reg Meuross was entirely new to me. He sang a pleasant enough song with a guitar; and then he sang a pleasant enough song with a guitar; and then he song the best damn song about a highwayman (and there are one or two) I've ever heard, and then followed through with the agonizingly beautiful World War I ballad ...And Jesus Wept. He has a Tilston-esque facility for complex, cerebral lyrics combined with melodies that could almost, but not quite be traditional. ("A nations guilty secret is this generation's debt / the hand of God came down last night and Jesus wept.") Lizzie Loved a Highwayman has something of the rambling quality of Slip Jigs and Reels, come to think of it.

Seth Lakeman is possibly still not quite My Kind of Thing but he did an absolutely storming set, and his new Blacksmiths Prayer, is a strange, powerful, beautiful thing.

Karine Polwart is my new folk hero for keeping going when the first bout of technical hitches threatened to mess up her brutal ballad "The Sun's Coming Over The Hill". ("He said that the loved me and swore he would die for me / then he drove off the road full of whisky and irony"). I associate her with the elliptical, enigmatic and slightly dark songs, but she can run to lovely sentimental gush about talking to her daughter on over skype ("I give a little, take a little wi-fi love / better than nothing but its never enough.)

But it was, as ever, Show of Hands who provided the defining moment of the weekend. Three lines into Cousin Jack, the PA exploded into feedback and Steve, entirely unphased, pointed out at the audience who took up the song until the electrics started working again. Magic. The sort of thing you can't plan for, and the sort of thing you can't get on a CD.

But maybe fix it so it doesn't happen again next year, peoples?

I wear a hat now. Hats are cool.

Priddy Folk Festival

It rained and it rained and it rained. Piglet said that in all his years of going to festivals, and he was goodness knows how old -- three was it or four? -- he had never seen such rain. Except at Glastonbury last year, of course. That was real mud. At Priddy I didn't do much worse than get the tops of my wellie boots damp. In the old days when we had proper mud, we used to sink right down to our knees. Took two people to pull me out, it did, and leave my boots stuck in the mud. And you try to tell people that, and they just don't believe you.

In a way it is a Good Thing that this festival was such an Adventure. It is the first proper folk festival I've gone to under my own steam, as it were, and having survived more or less intact and even had a good time, I will feel confident of striking out on my own the next time two men with fiddles and one man with an accordion are playing music in a wet field in Somerset. (For example, the Trowbridge Village Pump festival the weekend after next. It could plausibly be argued that I am completely insane.)

Priddy is a smallish village, about 6 miles from Wells (as in "the bishop of Bath and") and about 15 miles from Brizzle. The only thing I knew about the place previously was that in the 19th century someone heard a friend of a friend remarking "As sure as the Lord walked in Priddy" and spliced the place into the "Jesus lived in Glastonbury" myth which Dan Brown inexplicably ignores. There is a church, a village hall, two pubs, a village green, no shops and a regular bus service (every Tuesday). I had a plan to get the bus to Wells and walk to Priddy if the weather was nice. So I got a taxi, shared with a nice man with a beard who was headed the same way and seemed to know absolutely everybody, and told me slightly more about medieval coins than I was able to absorb in one sitting. We had a drink in a pub and I proceeded to the Field to put up my Tent. 

All credit to the man in the camping shop at the top of Park Street. I asked for a tent that was a: waterproof and b: idiot proof, and he sold me an end-of-line thingy for about £25 which was so light that I was fairly sure there must be a bit missing. (Do the Boys Brigade use this type of tent nowadays, I wonder? I can't help thinking that tents which are easy to put up and stay where you left them even on dark and stormy nights take all the fun out of camping.) I erected the thing in a light drizzle; and while I had to admit that what I ended up with was tent shaped, the instructions (which made Ikea look like a model of clarity) gave relatively few clues about what I was meant to do with the various pegs and ropes that came with the package. Having put my tent as "up" as I could make it, I went back to the field where the actual music was happening.

The "official" part of the festival (accessible only to those of us who had purchased arm bands) consisted of two marquees, with concerts going on on Friday night, Saturday afternoon and evening and Sunday afternoon. They had, of course, cunningly arrange for James Findley, who I badly wanted to hear, to be playing in the small tent and the same time as Belshaazzars Feast, who I even more badly wanted to hear, were playing in the large tent. Such are the frustrations of festivals. I seem to recall that at Glastonbury (which was very muddy) faced me with a choice behind the Wombles and Show of Hands. Having positioned myself towards the front of the main tent, the rain decided to level up from drizzle to torrential, which made any question of running between tents, or even grabbing a beer, rather moot. Someone said that the entire rainfall for July fell that evening, although I don't think that can be right because it rained the next day as well. All I could think of was whether my extremely small tent would actually still be there when I got back....

The Saturday Do was opened and compered by The Willbees, two men singing close harmony and playing the ukelele, with a nice line in silly patter songs. I particularly enjoyed the one about the reversible ("I call it percival") fleece. We also had Jackie Oates, doing her sweetly traditional thing, this time in the company of a guest hurdy gurdy player. We had The Incontinentals, a comedy skiffle band who obviously believed themselves to be the funniest thing in the world. If they had quit the stage after 20 minutes, I might have agreed with them. We laughed when they sang an insanely OTT Grand Coulee Dam in cod American accents, practically getting on their knees for "...in uncle Sam's fair land..." And we were almost literally rolling in the aisles when they said "And now, we're going to introduce the band...." before going into a huddle, turning their backs on the audience, and introducing the band to each other. But there is really only so long that it remains amusing for one person to sing a song while the other person puts a chicken on his head.

I finally got to hear a full set by Balshazzars Feast. (I was right at the back of their set in Bristol 2011, and came in at the end in Frome this year.) They are rather brilliant. Paul Sartin is the one from Bellowhead who isn't Spires or Boden.  He sings and plays the fiddle. Paul Hutchinson plays the accordion. At no time do either of them put chickens on their heads, but if music could ever be "funny", this is funny music. It drifts from folk to music hall to light classical and back, so you are not quite sure how you got from a grim traditional one about being careful of picking your wife because most women are no good to "Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside". They get laughs merely by bobbing up and down in tune to the music. Inevitably, we finish with "...and we jolly sailors were lying up aloft while the landsman were lying down below below below..." with traditional folk actions. ("You look quite stupid" Paul tells the audience.)

By the time Spiers and Boden (the ones from Bellowhead who aren't Paul Sartin) arrive, the road into the festival has actually flooded. "Thank you for inviting us to the Venice of the West" says John Spiers. They have clearly taken to heart my comments about needing to vary their set, adding a Farewell Lovely Nancy which I don't think I've heard them do before, and a brand new take on the Seven Yellow Gipseys, slowing the tempo right down and adding a chorus to emphasize that it's actually a sad story about marital breakdown. (Expect it to be a fixture of their concerts all next year, and on the Bellowhead album after that.)   This doesn't mean they don't do the obligatory Bold Sir Rylas and the even more obligatory New York Girls, of course.

After concert. Returned to camp site. To my astonishment, my tent was still standing, and, indeed, almost completely dry on the inside. The ropes with the tent pegs attached to them had moved, but I stuck them back in and went to bend. Either I stayed up all night listening to the rain, or else I woke up every time it started to rain. Time passes at strange speeds under canvas.

Emerged from tent on Sunday morning. It was not actually raining. The ropes with the tent pegs attached to them had moved in the night; I stuck them in again, and proceeded straight to the New Inn and consumed Full English and coffee, followed by a coffee and a coffee, and then, not being quite ready to face the rain again,  sat in on a Sing Around during which an old man was so moved by a Steeleye Span song that he was unable to complete it. 

Thence up the hill to the village hall where Wil Kaufman was doing his astonishing live documentary about Woody Guthrie. This one-hour festival version concentrates on Woody's life story and skips over a lot of the background about the depression. Kaufman is a gripping story teller with well practiced audience pleasing gags. ("Has anyone read, or is anyone planning to read, Bound For Glory?...If you haven't, make sure you have your bullshit detectors on. If you have...it's too late.") He sings a mix of Woody songs (Do Ray Me, So Long Its Been Good To Know Ya); sub-Woody songs (The Unwelcome Guest) and related contemporary numbers (The Preacher and the Slave, Brother Can You Spare a Dime). He winds up with his literally jaw-dropping reconstruction of This Land Is My Land based on Woody's original notes (he has a photo of himself in the Guthrie archive with Nora) when the refrain was going to be "God Blessed America For Me" and "This is land is my land..." was going to be the eviscerating final verse. He encores with Steve Earl's Christmas in Washington. Stunning. The longest and warmest ovation of the whole weekend, and an early front runner for next year's Takes Out An Onion award. 

(The Plan had been to proceed from the village hall to the church to hear Three Cane Whale, but as a great man might have said, the church was full and the church was packed, so I went back to the field and listened to the overly bluesy afternoon concert instead.)

Two big musical discoveries  on Saturday night – were The Young 'Uns, a three man outfit doing a mix of close harmony traditionalish (they kicked off with the cheery "Every day you're in this place you're two days nearer death..") and self written industrial ballads with names like "Love In a Northern Town" and "Waving Good Bye To Stockton". The other was the gently marvellous Colum Sands who sings sparkly witty humorous songs which just stop short of caricature Irish whimsy. He offers songs about the daft things people say at wakes and songs about the daft things people say when you try to ask them for directions and serious reflective ones about carrying water from the well with his aunty, and ones that are half way in between, like the quite mad "Whatever you say, say nothing" which clearly arises from growing up during the Troubles. ("If an Irish village is called Kil-something it means there is a church there. Actually, most villages have two churches, one for us and one for them. Some have a third one, for the others.")

He did an additional, informal set with Rory McLeod in the pub on Sunday morning. It has to be said that much as I like groups of skilled musicians going diddly-diddly-dee on the stage while the audience get more and more excited ("If some of you would like to get up and dance in your wellies" says either McCusker, McGoldrick or Doyle "That would give us a good laugh") it's these informal, intimate moments which is what I go to festivals for. Rory McLeod was a revelation. I enjoyed his Saturday night set with his band – harp, double bass, lord knows what else – but I think his talent is shown off to much better effect when he's just singing. There's something of the white rapper or at any rate the performance poet about him: rambling songs, obsessed with rhymes, that get caught up in their own metaphors. The one about the old man who took a job in the old fruit and vegetable market for a week and stayed there for 50 years seems to go on and on forever without being too long.

The final Sunday afternoon included Phillip Henry (mouth organ genius) and Hannah Martin (fiddle and banjo  person) who I am starting to feel that I have heard the requisite number of times this year. (They've been opening for Show of Hands.) They are actually very good. Phillip demonstrates that by taking a mouth organ apart and combining it with "beatboxing" you can make it sound a lot like a melodian; and they wind up with a really very special blue grass shoe gaze trance version of the Lazy Farmer Who Wouldn't Hoe Corn. I don't know what that means either; but it was mournful and bluesy with lots of twangy bits round the edges. Heidi Talbot sang a song about a grey starling that is flying over the sea, trying to find the light at the edge of the land. It was only after five verses that I realised that it was the same  grey starling that lived in a lighthouse and rescued sailors from storms. Mabon wound the festival up by making practically everybody dance. The Sunday concert was massively improved by MC Tony Slinger (he's always around at these things doing ceilidh calling) who did a marvellous job of revving the audience up before and after each act. In fact, I am pretty sure that he told each act to wind up their set five minutes early so they could do an encore. It somehow feels like a downer for an act to go off stage with the audience stomping for more and the compère to have to say "I'm sorry but we're out of time."

So: having put the tent up successfully and pulled the tent down successfully, and not fallen on my arse in the mud even once, I felt that I had avoid all the pitfalls, literall and metaphorical of the weekend, and headed back to the Queen Victoria pub (where lots of people were still playing spontaneous sessions), ordered a beer and a burger, and asked if the landlord wouldn't mind pointing me in the direction of a taxi firm to take me back to Wells in time for the last bus to Bristol.

It appears that "Priddy" is the West Country equivilent of going South of the River. I felt, I do not mind telling you, like a bit of plonker. I could have phoned for a taxi at 5 o clock when the music finished, or at 6 o clock when I had demolished my tent. "Oh no" quod I "It is only 6 miles up the road, and I do not want to be struck stranded waiting on Wells bus station a desolate place full of lost luggage and lost souls for two hours!" I could, in fact, have set out after the music finished, and comfortably have walked to Wells in time for the last bus. Oh no, said the taxi people, we can't come all that way at this time of night. Not for hours.

The pub was presided over by one of those country landlords that they don't make them like any more. I strongly suspect he spent his spare time organising pilgrimages to Canterbury and forgetting about important letters to Hobbits. He appeared to know everybody, even the people he didn't know, to maintain a funny banter with them, and not to mind if lots of people who couldn't quite remember all the words to Matty Groves were in his pub provided they kept on buying his beer. Unflappably, he said "Just walk down to the sign post, follow the sign to Wells; there's a bus stop three miles up the road; if you start now you'll be able to have a pint at the Hunters Lodge and still catch the last bus". (You see, all the Landlords know each other: the pubs are connected by leylines, I shouldn't wonder.) This I did.

I am going to claim now, as a mean of winding up the story amusingly, that having reached the age of 100 (*) without ever having hitch-hiked, that as I rambled down that long dusty road with a back pack on my back I stuck out a thumb, was picked up by a passing motorist, and the weekend ended with bonhommie and chat about the relative merits of Show of Hands and Bellowhead. In fact, it didn't even occur to me to stick my thumb out. A nice man who had taken up the fiddle late in life saw me with my backpack and stopped without asking and took me all the way back to Bristol.

Because most people are nice. There were a thousand people at the festival, I guess, and lots of beer being served, but I didn't see one single police officer. They could have been disguised as morris dancers, I suppose. There were some of the mad violent kind who black their faces up before hitting each other with sticks. (Morrismen, I mean, not police officers.) But honestly, when was the last time you heard of a folk music riot?


(*) No, sorry, that's Woody Guthrie.

Folk Weekend

Black Swan
York

The Black Swan folk weekend passes in a whirl. There was quite definitely Old Peculiar beer, which tastes not unpleasantly of liquorice. There were chips. There was a day on which I subsisted entirely on Kit-Kats.

Its not exactly a festival in the normal sense. It doesn't cost any money, except what you spend on Old Peculiar and Kit-Kats. I assume the performers must perform for free, so obviously no A-list big names, although two of my most favourite bands were there.

There are lots of different rooms. There is a sign in the main bar which says “No instruments allowed in the bar”. There's a small back-room in which musicians engage in a more or less non-stop “session”. (A “session” is when a lot of musicians sit in a back room and go diddley diddly dee until someone asks them to stop. Three years ago I did not know this.) There's another small room which mainly consists of “singarounds”. (A singaround is where a lot of people sit in a room and take it in turns to sing. This is something else I used not to know.) This results in one hearing more versions of A Blacksmith Courted Me than you strictly need to in one weekend. Upstairs there is a bigger room, which houses what is described as a "rolling folk club" – local people doing short sets, mostly good. It is called the Woolf Room. Apparently the bold fellow who the French did wound in his left breast used to live in it.

Outside, in the car park, there is a marquee for the bigger bands. The pub is medieval and picturesque. The car park, not so much.

There was a good deal of rain over the weekend, and the marquee had a charming habit of developing small holes and pouring huge quantities of water over random punters. The first act on Saturday was a man who sung standards like The Trees They Do Grow High with a Scottish accent. At one point a gust of wind made the whole tent shift six inches to the left. At another point, the local council arrived, fixed the overflowing drains, and caused a terrible smell to hover over Are You Going To Scarborough Fare. He kept going and so did the audience. I got about as wet as it is possible to get during an indoor festival.

Exact details about who I did and didn't hear are therefore rather hazy. I distinctly remember hearing the Sail Pattern doing their thing the marquee. I wouldn't say I travelled all the way from Bristol to York in order to hear them, but I was extremely keen to find out if they were as good as they had seemed at Scarborough and on their EP. They were. They were so good that Nick wrote something nice on Twitter and downloaded their album, presumably even paying for it. (Naturally he didn't tell me he liked them. We're British.) They pretty much thumped us in the face with a series of big numbers – the infallible Haul Away; their quite stunning rehabilitation of Spanish Ladies (traditional chorus, invented verses and a huge rocky oomf for “we'll rant and we'll roar”) and the completely OTT Mary Mac's Mother's Making Mary Mac Marry Me My Mothers Making Me Marry Mary Mac which I think they only do at live shows to show off that they can – all four of them, including the ones who can't sing, get to do a verse, which gets faster and faster and more tongue twisting as the thing goes on. I hope there's a full length album on the way. These kids are good.

I am quite certain that I spent some of Friday night in the “folk club” listening to Stan Graham and friends doing a tribute to Tom Paxton. (Stan Graham is a singer in residence at the folk club, wrote Blow The North Winds Across Old Whitby Harbour and is clearly very influenced by Paxton in his “crooner” mode.) Someone sang Jennifer's Rabbit, inadvisedly, and someone else sang a piece of whimsy, new to me, about the Rubick Cube; we all got to join in with Here's To You My Rambling Boy and the evening ended with five singers and the audience trying to remember all the words of It's A Lesson To Late For The Learning, Tum Te Tum, Tum Te Tum Tum Te Tum You Know That Was The Last Thing On My Mind. One of the singers remarked that Paxton, not Dylan, should be regarded as the true successor to Woody Guthrie, and demonstrated by singing the brutal anti Vietnam piece Good Night Jimmy Newman. Guthrie also wrote terrible children's songs, come to think of it.

I definitely heard my friend Martin singing shanties and drinking songs with local trio Two Black Sheep and a Stallion. (I think I can describe him as my friend because twenty years ago I appeared in a play with him.) They were just back from Canada, and sang Barretts Privateers which is my favourite Stan Rogers song (along with all the others) and a long song about an 18 mile pub crawl in Vancouver as well as a song about a lock-in in any English pub. The three of them stood in a row with pints in their hands. It doesn't get more like a folk group in a Yorkshire Pub than that.

I believe I also sat in on a sing-around chaired by Martin which definitely included a local man singing all a hundred and three verses of The Merry Merry Huntsmen Blows His Horn with the audience becoming less and less accurate on each repetition. You know the one?  The rich man spends the night with the chambermaid, and leaves a guinea to pay for board, lodging and the goose he ostensibly came to buy, and when he comes back the next year he's present with a a baby instead of breakfast.

Enraged at hearing others laugh, "What is this here?" says he

"Come sit you down beside me, sir, and I'll tell you," says she.

"Last year you was so generous, nay, do not think it strange.

You gave to me a guinea; well, I've brought you back your change."

I definitely also sat in on on a sing-around chaired Stuart from Blackbeard's Tea Party and threes guys from another local shantyband called Monkeys Fist, who I must have heard performing later in the weekend because I now own both their CDs. Interestingly enough the second CD contains a version of Blow The Man Down Me Boys Blow The Man Down Give Me Some Time To Blow The Man Down which has rather familiar narrative -- 

Joe waited an hour he ne're thought it strange (wahay! blow the man down!)

It's a hell of a time for to wait for me change (give me some time to blow the man down!)

Joe waited all evening but the maid she had flow (wahay! Blow the man down)

Then out of this basket there came a low groan (give me some time to blow the man down!)

Maybe its a Yorkshire thing? I find the rather random way in which songs were, and clearly still are, being passed around, endlessly fascinating. 

Stuart sang a saucy song about "courting tied up in a sack" and Sydney Carter's carol about John Ball.  My friend Susannah (she's definitely my friend because I'm godfather of her little tot) who'd been at the singing workshop earlier in the day did a creditable Bold Sir Rylas. 

Blackbeards Tea Party themselves were on great form. They've obviously got a massive local following: their set was the only time over the weekend where you couldn't even get standing room in the leakey marquee. They did some of their repertoire off the album – Landlord, Chicken On a Barge, and the wondrous I Can Hew – as well as some new ones. A while back they mentioned on Twitter that they were going to follow up Landlord with a song about a landlady and wondered if anyone could guess what it was going to be. All I could think of was The Wild Rover. This afternoon, all was revealed, and they confirmed their impeccable taste in song choosing. It was, of course, Jake Thackray's My Landlady Had Three Lovely Daughters ("this song is DIRTY"). I have to say that in the marquee, some of Jake's wonderful tongue twisting lines got submerged in the boys rocking out, but it's just the sort of saucy material that Stuart does so well, and it's great to see the group doing exactly the kind of song that you wouldn't expect them to do. (Has anyone given a folk rock treatment Jake's songbook before, come to that?) They also do a version of a Peter Bellamy Rudyard Kipling number (The Ford of Kabul River) which I haven't heard before but seems promising. There are other youngish groups (the aforementioned Sail Pattern, the not recently mentioned Pilgrims Way, the never mentioned at all Young 'Uns) whose music I like almost as much. But no-one, literally no-one, possibly not even t.m Bellowhead does a better live show, with more sense of theatricality and fun than Blackbeards Tea Party.  (And they are modest and approachable and charming to their fan.)

I also have a distinct memory of watching my friend Aaron (I am almost definitely sure that he's my friend because I used to share a house with him) performing with a group that played those enormous and threatening looking Japenese drums. York is obviously the kind of place you'd expect to find Japenese drummers.

There was also Morris dancing. It's my belief that folk festivals never actually invite morris dancers; they just swarm in, like ants to a honey pot. Matthew Boyle ought to take note: he may not have invited any morris sides to the Olympics, but that doesn't mean that, like Des O'Connor, they won't come anyway.

I distinctly recall that Sunday night merged into abandoning the programme and drifting from room to room to see what happened. I sat in for 45 minutes on Stuart, Laura and Tim from Blackbeard's TP jamming on squeeze boxes on fiddle; then went to the small room and listened to a sing around; upstairs to hear my friend Tony (I fully accept that he is my friend because he assures me that we attended the same church about 20 years ago) singing a very clever song about Ray Bradbury as part of the Song Writers circle; went outside to hear an actually distinctly good man singing Americana – any set that includes John Hardy Was A Desperate Little man is a good set – and then back to the back room where Stuart and Tim were still playing squeeze box. Five hour sessions in York pubs are probably the folkie equivilent of the a residency in Hamburg. As the evening wore on, Stuart treated us to a sample of his repertoire of extremely (as he puts it) saucy music hall songs. "We're having a bit tonight / We're having a bit tonight / Me Mother says I must be quick / To get a bit of Spotted Dick" (Young people and Americans: will probably not believe that the English used to call a hot sweet suet pudding with currents as “Spotted Dick”; but then they probably will not believe that the English used to eat hot sweet suet puddings with currents. I'm not actually sure they ever did. I think the pudding was invented purely for the sake of the double entendre. "Grandpa has no teeth so he will have to suck his...")

I've now been going to folk gigs for long enough that I should probably stop saying "I haven't been going to folk gigs for very long" but I haven't actually experienced anything like this before: the sense that there was a local network of people who learn songs, write songs, sing songs, or just drink slightly too much beer; the invisible lines of how differnet peoples songs connect together; the sense that this is all fun and communal. The traddy beery acapella of Two Black Sheep and Monkeys Fist has clearly fed into the OTT nautical folk-rock of Blackbeard and Sail Pattern, and the singarounds, even when not very good, are about the closest thing you get in Real Life to authentic oral folk singing.

At the beginning of the weekend I was thinking "well, I probably wouldn't come all the way for this, but since I'm passing" (I have, as you may have spotted, one or two friends in York); by the end, I had already marked it in my diary for 2013. The programme (consisting largely of, lets be honest, local people you havent heard of) doesn't go anywhere to conveying the atmosphere of the weekend. The pub, and the club, were the star. The weather, not so much. 

Hey nonny no!

Bristol Folk Festival

Colston Hall

Bath Ales have ludicrously re-branded “Barnstormer” as “Barnsy”. I would no more order a pint of Barnsy than I would eat a Snickers bar. The organizers of the second Bristol Folk Festival had evidently taken to heart some of the complaints about last year's refreshments: the addition of a “beer tent” on the ground floor and some festival friendly snacks at the caff were a great help, although the Mexican frajita place over the road did very good business.

On Monday evening the compère does the Folks Men joke again. Everything is folk music, he says, because everything is written by and performed by folk, not by, say, plants or animals. So the Anglo Celt Sound System is totally folk.

They play a sort of young people's night club dance music; with that drum rhythm dominating everything, while a front man in a turban does his thang on one of those huge drums and another one plays Irish whistle or Northumbrian Pipes. I could recognise it has as having some connection to instrumental folk – several musicians all doing their own thing on their own instruments in such a way that it all comes together into a single thing that you dance to. In that sense it was quite similar to what the people in the bar were doing with fiddles and squeeze boxes. (Folkbuddy claims that they even went into Cuckoo's Nest -- a Morris tune with filthy words that no-one ever sings -- but I had evidently stopped paying attention by that point.) The band definitely had a following: people were forming a queue an hour before they were due to come on stage. But I couldn't help noticing that other people were also leaving before the end.

Doubtless if you liked this kind of thing this would be the kind of thing that you liked. But it was a bit niche to finish the festival on. Last year we had Bellowhead and glitter coming from the ceiling. Everyone likes Bellowhead. This year we had a very good night club band; and a sense that the actual folk festival finished with Sam Sweeney and Hannah James doing their delicate traditional tunes and clog dancing (how can a form of dance based on having blocks of wood on your feet be so damn graceful?) before we let the Young People do their thing for a couple of hours before bed time.

Did I not once tell you to avoid anything with the words "Celtic" or "Fusion" in the main job description?

There was a big stand on the bridge outside the main hall selling "old fashioned" sweets – white chocolate things with hundreds and thousands on them, rice paper sherbet flying saucers, Hershey bars, multi flavoured pretzels. I liked the Finnish liquorice best; soft like a truffle, sugary on the outside, salted on the inside, a very strong liquorice taste without the chewiness I like the taste of salty licquice, by usually find that much salt is a little nauseous. I think that liquorice like porridge, should taste of itself rather than being used as a sugar delivery mechanism. I think the same thing about Krispy Kreme Donuts, but wouldn't go as far as putting salt on a donut.

When I said that I didn't like “Celtic” music, some people affected to believe that that meant that I didn't like Celtic music. Which would obviously be ridiculous. Sunday's headliner, for example, was the slightly too ethereal for my taste Cara Dillon, backed up with what (I am assured) was a who's who of famous Irish instrumentalists. I am no expert in what is technically known as the diddly-diddly-dee sub-genre (sub-sub-genre “look how fast I can play this damn whistle”) but that doesn't mean that I can't enjoy it. Ms Dillon, of course, didn't use the c-word. She called it “Irish music” or more specifically “this is a tune from County Tyrone.”

Ewan McLennan was by some distance the best thing I heard over the entire weekend. He came on to the stage and practically whispered "A Mans and Man For A'That". And then, in case we'd missed the point, played "Auld Land Syne" on his guitar. You forget that these tunes, belted out at so many drunken parties, have a real proper melodic beauty if you trust them. But the soft, feathery delivery could wrong-foot you: before long he's bringing the same style to protest songs; turning "Banks of Marble" from a rabble rousing soap box thumper into a meditation on injustice and then topping it with an almost too painful to listen to version of Old Man’s Song.

We're living on the Pension now and it doesn't go too far
Not much to show for a life that seems like one long bloody war
When you think of all the wasted lives it makes you want to cry
I don't know how to change things but by Christ we'll have tae try

Oh, and an audacious reworking of Bob Dylan’s Blues from the Radio 2 Freewheelin' project. Take a silly, filler song. Slow it down. Deliver the lines as if they mean something even if you don't have the faintest idea what. Someone said that he sang it better than Bob Dylan's version. I don't think that's true. I think that this sort of cover is always sort of kind of engaging in an inter-textual debate with the original. If we didn’t know how Almighty Bob sung it, we wouldn’t be gasping with amazement at Ewan’s reworking.

Celtic indeed.

I think that I shall become the kind of person who likes liquorice I shall make a big thing of it. It's the sort of thing you might right on a character sheet in an RPG to show that you have an interesting personality.

Luke Jackson was by some distance the best thing I heard over the entire weekend. I wish I hadn't raved about him quite so much after Frome, because the set he did in the more intimate Colston Hall 2 was on a whole different level. Five years from now, he will be the biggest thing in folk, unless they steal him from us an make him into a pop star. The photos on his Facebook page show signs that someone is trying to brand him, which would be a shame. There's an honesty, even a naivety to his performance; telling us that a particular song is the one that been in his act for the longest (he's not yet 18) or introducing a traditional number with “I'm not quite sure who wrote this.” He has a deep, mellow voice which lets him pull off an old spiritual like Poor Wayfarin' Stranger with an intensity that I can hardly believe. There's absolutely no sense that he's mimicking a more experienced singer: you feel he's felt it himself. But its the self-written songs which crystallize his own experience: climbing trees, riding his bike in the park, realising he's going to lose track of his three best friends, hearing people on the bus running down teenagers. They are so perfectly done that listening to them almost seems voyeuristic. He encores with Oakham Poachers ("Steve Knightley asked me to do something traditional”) and while its clearly a cover of the Show of Hands arrangement, it suddenly, startling goes into his own bluesy riff on the final line. Astonishing.

"You may now cross off "dead children" on your O'Hooley and Tidow bingo card" tweeted Folkbuddy. This was immediately retweeted by O'Hooley and Tidow. Twitter is a powerful friend and a dangerous enemy. At one level, live tweeting events like this is great fun; and occasionally helpful, when other twits tell you what is going on somewhere else. At another, it tempts you to spend the event in the twittersphere, not in the moment (which is always a problem for a writer, even without the 140 character limit). And the acts themselves are reading your tweets. Since my Folkbuddies refused to eat the Hershey bars I purchased from the liquorice shop I idly tweeted "I wonder if the band like American chocolate" "Yes please" tweeted back Mawkin "Enjoy the set..."Which is sweet: but it makes one immediately reluctant to tweet “this band sucked”. Actually, my general rule, being one who does not know anything about music but knows what he likes is to only review acts I've enjoyed. When I hear someone I don't think much of, I generally leave well alone.

(Which is not, by the way to be construed as meaning that if I don't review something I thought it was awful. I had a great time listening to Andy Irving at the the Folk House in May. He's one of my favourite singers. Specially liked his straight down the middle version of the It Was Sad When the Great Ship Went Down to mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the wassisname, and his very traditional Stewball. I just didn't get around to putting pen to paper. I also failed to say anything about the very wonderful Monty Award Winning Chris Ricketts at the same venue. His version of Leaving of Liverpool reduced the entire audience to tears, and I was impressed as hell that he finished up with What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor. Not ironically or post- modernly; he just seemed to trust the song. Neither Andy Irvine nor Chris Rickets were at the folk festival. Now I've confused everybody.)

Instrumental folk is not always my most favourite thing, but Mawkin do it better than anyone I've ever heard. That was precisely 140 characters, that was.

O'Hooley and Tidow were by some distance the best thing I heard over the weekend. The last time I reviewed them, I described them as "depressing" (a fact they apparently remember). Actually, this isn't entirely fair. I would now be more inclined to say "haunting". Some of their songs pass almost unnoticed at the gig and then come back and kick you in the teeth three days later. The musical setting of a sentimental Victorian poem called Little Boy Blue, for example. They hold it, as so many of their lyrics, at arms length; there is something detached, and therefore chilling, about their performance. The verse is pure sentiment; it could almost be an Edwardian parlour ballad. But in the middle of the song, something altogether more contemporary cuts in; with percussive piano and declarative singing, it's an unsettling ultimately very moving shift in direction. (Clever, too: the line "but as he was sleeping an angel song awakened our little boy blue" would have been cloying.) But the tune is deceptive; I suddenly found the melody (“what has become of our little boy blue”) drifting to the top of my consciousness a week later and making me feel sad for no reason at all. There own lyrics love to hold up the ordinary for observation: the astonishing song about the old couple's coach trip to Blackpool piles trivial detail on trivial detail ("and the handbag with the fiddly catch that sometimes nipped her finger / but it matched her coat and sunday shoes so it really didn't matter") with an urgent, driving rhythm. It ends "'Have you enjoyed your day trip?' Vera says 'It were real'." Lancashire people do use "It were real" to mean "I had a good time"; but the line is taken up and repeated over and over until it becomes a sort of Samuel Beckett existential yell at the universe. Or something.

I have also previously raved about Solarferance. All three of my Folkbuddies bought their album, which proves that I was right. They are the ones who stand on the stage with Macbooks, making strange noises with mortars and pestles and musical saws and live looping them, while singing very detailed close harmony versions of traditional songs. I think Folkbuddy is probably correct that they need to work on their stage personae; Nick in particular has a slight tendency to look like someone doing a send up of disc jockey; but it's early days and what they are doing is fantastically difficult. "I never had but one true love" is awfully clever, The multi lingual Cutty Wren is still the best thing they do; the point, at which, I think, they passed beyond being awfully clever to actually making music.

Every folk festival, I assume, involves a young woman singing "I'm Being Followed by a Moon Shadow", "Streets of London" and "Leaving on a Jet Plane." I have no problem with this. I would be sorry if it didn't happen. The sense of being at folk festival is an important part of being at folk festival. I have more than once been in a not very pleasant venue drinking not very nice beer when a not very talented young man with a hat, beard and guitar sits on a chair and sings a not very good song about the banking collapse and how it relates to the young lady who is no longer dating him and thought "this is exactly what I signed on for". I described her on twitter as "charming". Folk-buddy wanted to know if my liquorice had been drugged.

Show of Hands did a fairly restrained set. By their standards. Regular readers will be aware that last year's performances was the best set ever done by anyone anywhere and they made no particular attempt to top it. They are never less than very good. We had a Cousin Jack and an AIG, Phil got to do Jamestown and Innocents Song, Steve Got to Home of a Million Dreams (which I don't think is as good as he obviously does) everyone did Keys of Canterbury, and we wound up with Now You Know Will You Come Back To Me. There was a hen night. A group of young ladies with a big banner that read "Getting married but still in love with Steve and Phil". (There are some folk performers, such as Seth Lakeman for example, who you can easily imagine young ladies adoring for their boyish good looks. Phil Beer and Steve Knightley, not so much.) This rather boosted the party atmosphere. I don't think Steve did as much banter as he usually does, since he spent most of the period between the songs engaging in call and response with the girls. Which was fine. In fact it rather underlines what a showman he is; quite able to fool around with the hen party, and then dedicate his last song to them, and say "good luck for the big day" in a stage whisper before quitting the stage. Wanting to postpone the debate about whether objecting to the common fisheries policy -- or indeed listen to a song about a character who objects to the common fisheries policy -- makes one a Nazi, I hung around in the hall and had a chat with the ladies. They'd were serious Show of Hands fans. They'd been calling out for him to sing Poppy Day, which is an incredibly depressing song about a drug dealer and had been at the Albert Hall concert the previous month. They said Now You Know was their favourite song; I said that Cousin Jack always makes me cry because my Daddy was Cornish. We left feeling that we were the best of friends.

That's the kind of band they are: not necessarily my favourite song writers (1) or my favourite live act (2), but never failing to catch the mood of the hall (angry last year, festive this year) and create a corporate experience. Godlike, in other words.

Lucy Ward is beautiful and lovely and funny and clever and I think I am probably in love. She drew a little heart on my CD and was just as lovely meeting the fans off stage as talking to them on stage. The picture of her on her album makes her look like a fey Monroe-ish starlet In real life she has bright blue hair and says that the best thing about Shrewsbury is that every third shop sells cakes. (She lived on macaroni pie during the folk week, apparently.) She has a sense of humour and comic timing which makes you think that she could probably hack it as a stand up comedienne if she wanted to; but in between the bubbling are some very dark songs. Alice in the Bacon Box is about a lady who ends up in the workhouse because someone takes her cardboard box away. Its based on a true story. She's good at making unexpected turns, as with her “traditional English song by Jarvis Cocker” which she does so well and, er, audibly that it made me go back and listen to the original. The recording which catches her stage act the best is Maids When Your Young, which is sung with an absolutely conspiratorial level of filth which is a joy to behold. She was by some distance the best thing I heard over the weekend.

Many people thought that Lady Maisery was the best thing over the whole weekend. There was a squeeze box, clog dancing and a strange Norwegian thing which may really be called "diddling" in which you sort of sing instrumental numbers. And there was a song about a fairy.

Dan Walsh plays the banjo and Will Pound plays the harmonica. Half way through, Dan did his banjo solo. You know that thing where the music gets so quick that's its obviously the climax, and everyone claps, and then he gets even faster? He did that three or four times. Brilliant (and he was properly playing a tune as well, not just showing off.) It was obviously the best bit of musicianship anyone did over the whole weekend the whole weekend (seriously).

"Hmm...8 out of ten" said Will when he returned to the stage.

Some years ago I was involved in the design of a computer game about pirates. There were different kinds of pirate ships, each with different attributes. (It was, as I may have mentioned before, described by the Daily Telegraph as "adequate".) In several years of writing documents and setting up auto-correct functions, I still discovered new ways of miss-spelling "manoeuvrability".

I feel very much the same way about liquorice.

I didn't get very near the free stage this year because there was so much going on in other place, but would award several points to an Irish student Celidah band, quite possibly called Really Potcheen, who did things like Galway Girl very nicely and honestly. They described New York Girls as a Bellowhead cover, which says something about the nature of the Tradition.

And the Appliejacks who did appallachian clog dancing. At one point, the nature of the venue meant that the music from upstairs and the music from downstairs was in competition. English Morris dancing and American clog dancing. On Sunday, the man with the big Indian drum taught some of the morris dancers how to dance.

Now, that's what I call fusion.

(1) Chris Wood

(2) Chumbawamaba

Isambard Folk Award

Colston Hall

The Isambard Folk Awards, named after the fella who invented bridges, are a newcomers thang. Anyone can send in a CD, the five best get to perform at the finals; the judges say how terrific the standard has been and that music isn't really a competition anyway, and the winner gets to appear on the main stage at the festival next month. All jolly nice. Fairly certain I was the only person in the audience who wasn't in, related, or at any rate connected to, one of the bands.

I was pretty sure I had it down to a two horse race between Solarferance and Misshaped Pearls. Solarferance did a sort of folk electronica, somewhere between the early Jim Moray and Duotone: that thing where the musicians are playing acoustic instruments and then mixing them live on stage with apple macs, so they end up accompanying themselves and creating what soundscapes. The process may have been taken slightly to an extreme: not only was the good old Cutty Wren accompanied by a mortar and pestle and musical saw, but it was also sung simultaneously in English and Welsh. (So we now know that the Welsh for "Milder and Mulder" is "Dibber and Dobber".) And when your act positively invites comparisons with Mr Moray, maybe its a little courageous to attempt Lucy Wan, without a rap artist but with a reel of sellotape. However Nick Janeaway and Sarah Owen can actually properly sing and the wierd sounds they produced were genuine response to the songs themselves. I particular liked the fading reverberations of "...and what will you do when your father gets home?" in Lucy Wan . (In real life "wait til your father gets home" is proverbially said to a naughty child who has catapulted a pebble through the dining room window; less often to a lad who has made his sister pregnant, chopped off her head and spoiled her pretty bodee.) Much my favourite act, partly because it wasn't like anything else and partly because, in a funny way, it was the most traditional thing of the evening.

But I fully expected the judges to give the prize to Misshaped Pearls, a big seven piece world music ensemble with a Taboresque leading lady who offered complicated instrumentation of Latin lyrics by Ovid and finished up waxing all south American with something which I didn't get the title of written by a Mexican nun. Not precisely my sort of thing, but awfully polished and professional, with a big rich sound that was arguably closer to being actual music than the first lot.

On balance, I ruled out the opening act, Common Tongues, who seemed to be doing very pleasant, singery songer-writery acoustic rock; very listenable to but quite like a lot of other things I'd heard somewhere. I also didn't think that the rather interesting Welsh five piece Evening Chorus, who started out doing close harmony that veered dangerously in the direction of the barbers shop, but then expanded into long drawn out complicated multi-layered rambles, putting me rather in mind of Alasdair Roberts at his more expansive, would get it.

"Either the clever electronic people", I said, "Or the big world music band, with just a small chance of the interesting Welsh five piece."

So, naturally, the judges gave it to Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker. Josienne is a lady who sings semi-traditional songs with her hands, squeezing out an awful lot of emotion and drama, as if she was personally gutted by the fact that her Donald works on the sea. Ben plays fantastically detailed tinkly-tonkly guitar, counterpointing her music rather in the manner of Mr Martin Simpson, who he lists as an influence, as does everybody else.

I can only suppose that the judges gave it to them because they were clearly the most talented people in the room. If not necessarily the cleverest or most innovative.

Which is, like, crazy talk.

Frome Folk Festival

Frome, pronounced Frome, is a picture-skew town between Bristol and Bath; small tea-rooms and quaint terraces into which a small modern shopping centre has been unceremoniously dropped. It boasts one of the only surviving branch railway stations from Brunell's era, and no trains back to Bristol after 10PM at night. Up to this point in my life, I have always found my lack of a drivers' licence to be a very minor inconvenience. I have a very good working relationship with Megabus and regard, to the occasional consternation of visitors, distances of up to 70 minutes as "well within walking distance". Having recently discovered that the main thing I wish to do with my leisure is attend music festivals, the lack of a car becomes quite a nuisance. This weekend was, I therefore swear, the first time in my adult life I have stayed in a hotel my by myself. A pleasant room above a pub, with tea making facilities and a trouser press. Only one though: since I was there for a folk festival, there should surely have been two corbies. (1)

This was the first time there has been a folkfest in Frome: I note that if I had turned up a week late, there would have been a potato festival in the same venue. (2) The main venue was the cavernous Cheese and Grain; sometimes used for shows but clearly often used for markets. One of the acts commented that, looking out into the audience -- some of us eating egg-and-bacon breakfasts, some of us (I use the term "us" advisedly) in Morris dancing kit, bunting and flags hanging from the ceiling and a big advert for an Indian curry house on the wall -- was the most English scene you could possibly have imagined. (3) There were also smaller gigs in an absolute gem of a local cinema, with a proper sweet kiosk and tip-up seats, just like cinemas used to be in the olden days; and a small room in a masonic hall. Since my various folkbuddies had crazy ideas about wanting to attend friends weddings and take care of elderly relatives I was on my own. I always find that a level of obsessive panic descends under such circumstances: if I had had folkbuddies with me, I would have happily sat out one of the acts to have lunch or a beer – as it was I felt I was doing something appallingly wrong if there was a single minute of the day when I wasn't listening to music: even if it was only the little girl with the "I love Sam Sweeny" cardigan playing her fiddle to an empty "open mic" cinema or escaping from the rain into the Blue Boar pub where a lady from one of the morris groups was standing at the bar singing my fifth favourite folksong. (The version in which the miller is hanged and the elder sister is boiled in lead.) Not to mention a man with a mandolin singing about the Yankie Clipper.

And music there was a lot of, provided by many of the most eminent Usual Suspects – a veritable "who's who" of modern English flok, impressive for a brand new festival, albeit in a lower key than some: Spiers and Boden sansBellowhead; Jim Moray sans trio, Steve sans Phil, etc. And – I mean this in a caring way – it was nice to see the weekend get progressively less shambolic as it went on; as if the organisers were (very understandably) spotting things which weren't going right and sorting them out. The main venue, the Cheese and Grain, had a bar in the back, which very naturally meant that there was a lot of ambient bar noise, some times quite intrusive, during the acts. They progressively put up notices and kept the bar lights down to minimize this. I got the impression – knowing nothing whatsoever about this, admittedly – that the sound engineer didn't know what was about to hit him; having to set up for a big loud five piece like Mabon and immediately re-jig for the very exacting guitar stylings of Chris Wood. (Or maybe the machine was experiencing machine problems. Or maybe the bands were being stroppy.)

Chris Wood was evidently getting annoyed by the P.A problems. Someone remarked on the Sunday morning that he had "used the f-word." I didn't have the heart to tell him that a gig in which Chris Wood doesn't use the f-word is more comment worthy. One of his songs (the funny tongue twisting Carthyite one about man who doesn't want to get married yet) completely broke down; I rather suspect he finished on John Barleycorn because it was an absolute foolproof crowd pleaser. But who is going to complain about having to listen to Chris Wood singing John Barleycorn? The compère was at least acknowledging that the PA had been a problem on the last day; it actually seemed to be much improved at the end of the weekend and will presumably be thoroughly sorted next year.

The other thing they'll get better next time around is the programme, which listed names and times but no other information, leaving those of us who still don't know everything about music at a bit of loss to know whether "Fallen Tide" or "Hips and Haws" was more likely to be the kind of thing we would enjoy. (And no use of the interwebs, even though lots of us can haz smart phones nowadays: what price a fromefolkfest hashtag to tell us that such-and-such a set has been cancelled and so-and-so are starting late?) So my listening was a bit random and I probably missed some good stuff.

I'd never heard Belshazzars Feast before: a duo consisting of the One From Bellowhead Who Is Niether Spiers Nor Boden and A Man With a Beard. This is quite definitely the best fiddle + squeezebox comedy duo you will ever heard. It really does come across as musical stand-up comedy: sequences in which Paul leads and Paul appears to follow with the wrong notes; sequences in which the audience is asked to sing along with tunes which keep changing; songs with silly words. It takes a very high level of musicianship to pull this kind of thing off. I don't know how long it would stay funny for – I don't think I'd necessarily want an album – but this set was brilliant.

Jim Moray did a characteristically splendid acoustic set, complete with "a song about a sinister woodland elf rapist" (Hind Ettin) and an "invisible child murderer who can walk through walls" (Long Lankin.) Also "If It's True What They Say", on piano, from the Orpheus folk operetta, off the new album, in which he veers convincingly into "My Way" territory, having a fully fledged dramatic emotional crises at the keyboard. And he wound up with one he said he hadn't song before, the old American ballad "Peg and Awl". It really is very impressive the way he turns his hands from the traditional song to the power ballad to the folkie sing-a-long to the sweeping semi-classical piano accompaniment. I think I'm starting to like his stripped down acoustic act almost as much as the fully fledged electronica he's made his name with.

Pilgrims Way get better every time I hear them. (Folkbuddy suggests that they need to pay more attention to building a set rather than just playing some songs.) There's an increasingly long list of "good ones" while waiting for their eponymous signature song – Handweaver and the Factory Maid, Tarry Trousers, and Light Hussar are all first rate.

Greatly enjoyed Sean Lakeman and Kathryn Roberts. I've been trying to work out what "Carrie Love", the unbearable account of a miner during the 1980s NUM strikes, reminds me of. Really deserves to be much better known.

Spiers and Boden did a Spiers and Boden set, frankly, but you can never have too many Prickley Bushes and Spotted Pigs. I like the way they now finish up with New York Girls, but it does rather rub in the fact that Bellowhead now informs Spiers and Boden rather than vice versa. Earlier in the weekend, one of the acts whose name has erased itself from my notebook tried to get the audience singing along with one of his songs. The left hand side were to be singing a different tune from right hand side; everyone was supposed to be clapping on the off-beat. Total disaster. You can't help but admire Boden's expertise in getting this kind of thing to work. "Volume is more important than accuracy here...good. And don't worry too much about the consonants, just do the vowels...."

Steve Knightley wound up the weekend. No-one, as I have mentioned, works a crowd like Steve Kightley. Phil without Steve is a completely different act: Steve without Phil is, well, pretty much Steve without Phil. (This evening he went as far as delivering some of his one-liners to the spot where Phil would have been.) He did take the opportunity to do slightly more restrained versions of some of his numbers. I don't quite think that the thumping angry A.I.G quite works as a slowed down Dylanesque guitar piece, but it was worth a try; on the other hand the Galway Farmer is in its natural environment as an unaccompanied piece of story telling. There's real complexity and multiple levels to his song-writing: he opened with a piece about drugs and drug pushing that I hadn't heard before: the dealer travelling round the M25 selling heroin is a "poppy seller" like the British Legion charity sellers on Remembrance Day; the heroin comes from the poppy farms in Afghanistan, where soldiers are still being killed, like in Flanders Fields, which is where the poppy metaphor got started....But it's all worn lightly, and one feels one has heard a story, not a leading article pro or against the warren drugs. "Transported" is basically just a good old funny "trick" song about the modern sheep thieves who pull the wool over the police's eyes. Steve plays the audience for all they're worth in the refrain


There's no transportation down under
No gallows in the old county gaol
At best in the morning we're fined with a warning
At worst in the evening we're back out on bail...

But I loved the way he followed it up with the contrasting traditional and depressing Oakham Poachers. ("Oh it never happened before / Three brothers hanged together / For the doing of one crime.) I thought the only off note was winding up with a medley of Cousin Jack and Country Life; not that the two songs don't work as a medley and not that the audience didn't mournfully join in with the "aaa-aaa-aaa" bit. But honestly. "No schools / No homes / No shops / No pubs / What went wrong? What went wrong?" It's a bit of a downer to finish a set, let alone a festival on. I accidentally heard him doing more or less the same set in Bristol a week or two later, and he very sensibly added the sing-a-long Aunt Maria from the Cecil Sharp Project, which also has a very serious point, but is a much more up beat song with which to finish an evening.

Highlight of the weekend, in many ways was Luke Jackson, introduced by the aforementioned Steve Knightley, if only because I had never heard, or heard of, him before. Luke is, I think, seventeen. He has a powerful, deep voice and can pull off bluesy Americana like Poor Wayfarin' Stranger as well as anyone; but he also writes his own songs.

Now, nearly every third support act you hear is a singer-song-writer. They all have exactly the same floppy hair and self-effacing stage manner; they are all pretty good at guitar picking; and they all sing the same agonized monologues about having been dumped by the same girl, set in the same flat at the same time of day (4AM.) God often becomes involved in the proceedings, although the singers mood isn't improved by having to admit that he doesn't actually believe in God. Luke Jackson is not like this.

Luke Jackson writes honest, hugely affecting songs about his actual life. "Kiss us at the door and wish us luck" he sings to his parents. "' 'Cos everyone grows up." Oh. My. God. That's actual proper poetry. There is something enormously affecting about the way in which his big deep singing voice sometimes gives way to a spoken phrase which sounds terribly immature and teenage. When a man in his forties talks about "childhood" (4) it can come across as romantic bullshit; when Luke Jackson talks about taking his dog for a walk in the park and hanging out with his friends and adds "seems as if my childhood songs have been song" he's not talking about those blue remembered hills. He's talking about last year. (Two years ago at Trowbridge he was singing about the school bus, I'm told.)

I was born in the countryside
But I spend my day in town
Waste the whole morning sleeping in
And then just wander round...
But who are you to judge me?
Who are you? Let me be.

You or I might have had those kind of sentiments when we were 17. We might even have written them down in that kind of poetry. But you are or I didn't have a killer voice, an impressive guitar style and Steve Knightley as a mentor. Frankly, I've got no right to be listening to his album. It ought to be being passed around every sixth form in the country as a big secret that the old people won't really understand. His Youtube stream is instructive, as well: he covers a lot of songs which are frankly much to big for him – it clearly isn't 25 years or more since he did anything at all – which seems to be exactly the right kind of mistake for a person of his age to be making. And actually, his version of Blowin' in the Wind is rather brilliant: note the way he combines elements of Young Bob's version of the song with elements of Old Bob.

So, essentially: roll on next year's Frome, and see you all at the Brizzle fest in May.



(1) Sam Dodsworth, all rights reserved. You will, Oscar, you will.

(2) Oooo that's mean. Local gardeners getting together to sell or exchange seed. Perfectly sensible.

(3) Sensitive readers, freaked out by my reference to the toxic brand "England" are given due warning that by the end of the weekend I may well find myself listening to Mr Steve Knightley.

(4) Say with reference to old comic books and space movies

Summer Catch-Up

Back in July I heard the aforementioned Martin Carthy at the aforementioned Green Note in London. Carthy always leaves me breathless. There aren't too many performers who would play a few bars, and then say "I can't remember how that one goes, I'll play you this instead" – and then, when he gets to the encore, say "I've remembered it now" and embark on all 22 verses of Sir Patrick Spens (Scottish fella whose ship went down.) He also did a full length Famous Flower of Serving Men, which runs to about 30 verses. He thinks is about May festivals and not cross dressing and burning people at the stake after all. And Clyde Water, singing the whole Child Ballad version, including verses of exposition that usually get skipped: He thought it was his darling dear / Rose up and let him in / He thought it was his darling dear / But it was no such thing / It was the voice of her mother / She sounded just the same... This is why I will go and hear Carthy over and over again: he seems to know every verse of every song in the world and always be able to pull one out of his hat one that you haven’t heard before.

The following night I heard the aforementioned Alisdair Roberts at the same venue. I was almost hoping to be disappointed by this: I felt he couldn't possibly be as good as my last review said he was. But I was disappointed, in the sense of not. I don't know how he does it; I really don't. Utter faith in the material, I think. He presents Bonny Suzie Cleland absolutely unflinchingly; detachedly when he comes to the end (“her brothers did the fire make and her father dragged her to the stake”) there’s a palpable gasp from the audience and an uncomfortable pause as if we couldn't quite decide whether you were allowed to clap or not. He manages to present the corniest song in the repertoire, Barbara Allen, as if no-one had ever heard it before – as if the tragedy makes perfect sense as a thing that might have happened. And then does one of his own songs which include lyrics like "the people that we know as heroes / are those who walk the line twixt thanatos and eros" and get away with that too. Not so much a genius as a phenomenon, in the sense of "force of nature".

First week of August was the Bath Folk Festival in the Widdcombe club in Bath. Rather improved in format compared with the last year, I thought, with three acts doing shortish sets each night, and odd surprises like an invasion by a mob of unseasonal Mummers. My notes appear to be rather patchy: I definitely recall hearing Steve Tilston singing songs of his new album, including the soon to be standard The Reckoning and an excellent young traddy ballad singer called James Findley who I want to hear again; and lots of instrumental music of various ethnicities. 

Following weekend was a one day mini festival in Scarborough, imaginatively called Scarborough Fair. An odd one, this. The open air arena was barely half full, despite a programme made up entirely of headliners: one of the organisers rather plaintively asked us to call up our friends and tell them that they could still turn up on the door and hear (the mighty) Bellowhead. It was one of those venues with plastic, football stadium style seating and a very large stage, separated from the audience by 40 feet and a river. You could have sunk several Green Notes in the space between the audience and the front row. Which would have been a shame, because they would have drowned, but it’s the principle of the thing. With even (the mighty) Bellowhead struggling a little to put themselves across, what chance did a man with a guitar and a man with a fiddle have. Even if the man with the guitar and the man with the fiddle happened to be Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick? Jim Moray (see what I mean about headlines?) fitted in a lot better, although even he struggled to get the diffuse audience joining in with the village and city girls by the quayside. I give him a lot of points for tackling Lord Douglas -- his ongoing work in progress reworking of a traditional ballad, I think it comes out of the Cecil Sharp project – which is not a festival crowd pleaser but gets better and better every time I hear it.

I was introduced to two bands I'd never heard before: Duncan McFarlane and his band are very solid folk rockers who would probably like to be Show of Hands when they grow up: there's something of the pub band about them, but the guitars and drums don't swamp the fiddles and squeeze boxes. I wrote "Hoddamadoddery with amps" in my note book, which is probably not fair to either group. They finished on a rip-roaring Cold Hard Haily Night. No ones roar can fail to be ripped with that song. 

I had also not heard the Demon Barbers before, which was remiss of me. I was about to say "sub Bellowhead" but checking the dates, I think possibly (the mighty) Bellowhead are sub Damien Barber... They do a nice a line in cheeky treatments of fairly familiar folkie fair: "Captain Ward" (which t.m Bellowhead also sing) has acquired a superheroic chorus which goes "Captain Ward...Captain Ward..Captain Ward". And they wound up with A Friend of the Devil Is a Friend of Mine which isn’t strictly traditional, I don't think. But they also (this being the Demon Barbers roadshow) had bevvys of clog dancers and rappa dancers on the stage and in one wonderfully audacious coup d'arena had two male morris dancers peforming morris steps in the style of a ballet recital. As if to make the point about just how graceful and skillful that kind of dancing is once you take away the bells and the hats. Or possibly that the rest of the troup hadn't showed up. 

And there is, of course, nothing in the world like Jon Boden singing Port of Amsterdam with the serried ranks of the mighty Bellowhead behind him. Unless it is a Bellowhead audience using hand signals to agree that our hero has gone UP to the rigs, DOWN to the jigs, UP to the rigs of …. you know the song. 

But in a funny way, the thing which made the festival for me was the tiny second stage. Nice bit of planning, so that you could wander to the other end of the arena and watch local bands while the sound checks were being done on the main stage. One such was a very young group called The Sail Pattern doing a combination of semi-traditional sea shanties and weirdly authentic self written material in a sort of hyper-rock style, rather as if the Pogues had taken to doing English sea songs. And as if they were fresh faced seventeen year olds with teeth. I am not sure if someone that young ought to be allowed to sing something as grim as Hold Fast (“sew me up / wrapped in sail / commit me to the sea / hold fast boys / hold fast boys / put the last stitch in me”.) . And it takes lots and lots of chutzpah, in a good way, to sing your version of Haul Away (“a puppet’s on the throne of Spain and Bonapart’s in Cairo / with Nelson’s ship we sailed away and fought them on the Nile-oh”) half an hour before Bellowhead are going to take to the main stage. And winding up your short set with the tongue twistering Mary Mac’s Mother’s Making Mary Mac Marry Me, My Mother’s Making Me Marry Mary Mac is just showing off, frankly. Rather endearingly, they seemed surprised that anyone wanted to buy their CDs and hadn't brought enough. You can download their stuff for a fiver from http://thesailpattern.bandcamp.com/ Go on: they deserve your encouragement and you can claim you were a fan before they became famous. Which they are so going to do.

Robin Williamson did a gig a gig in the crypt of Woodlands Church, Clifton in September. Bob Dylan, you may have noticed, hardly ever plays in church halls. You hardly ever get to say "Thank you for a great set, Bob," after the show. And yet the Incredible String Band, in their day, were as great and as important as Bob, and I am not sure which I would choose between The Big Huge and The Times They Are a Changing if condemned to share a desert island with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Williamson seems to like doing small, community venues, I think it suits his image of himself as a bard or shaman or storyteller. (He sees himself as too Christian for the druids but too pagan for the Christians, apparently.) He’s accompanied by his wifeand muse Bina, who plays the bowed psaltery (I looked it up) and contributes Punjabi wedding songs in which Robin and the audience can only discern the word "tandori". (She encourages the audience to sing along with everything. "Only in the chorus" says Robin, pointedly.) Robin, as we've seen before, has eclectic tastes; this isn’t a "religious" concert but he’s slanting the repertoire to the location. He does a bluesy spiritual which, he points out, was also in his granny's Presbyterian hymnal; the audience sway along to "hide me in the blood; hide me in the blood; hide me in the blood of Jesus". He does a Latin version of Psalm 24 delightedly pointing out that although the Psalms are by far the oldest songs still in actual use, no-one knows what tunes they were originally sung to. (There is, apparently, an ancient document claiming that they were sung solemnly, "in the Egyptian style", but since no-one knows what the Egyptian style is, Robin says that he's going to sing it joyfully in the South American style.) He tells a folktale about three soldiers who make a bet with the devil, and does a perfect imitation of a hot Gospel evangelist. “If you’ve never met the devil face to face – if you’ve never met the devil face to face – if you’ve never met the devil face to face – then maybe it’s because you’re headed the same way he is.” He has us all singing his version of the old Irish riddle song

Greater than god, worse than the devil

Dead men eat it, if you eat it you’ll die

Come from nothing, go to nothing

If I tell you nothing then I’ll tell you no lie.

There is chocolate cake and nachos in the interval; the church sticks to a "give whatever you like" rule for refreshments, which puts everyone in a happy mood and probably means they make more money then they would have done if they'd charged. Robin has shaved his beard off since the last time I saw him.

Heard Swarbs  and Carthy again again in the much more congenial surroundings of St George's Bristol. "The programme notes say we're the best loved duo since Morcambe and Wise" says Swarbs "So we're going to play all the right notes..." There really is nothing in the world like hearing Swarbrick's fiddle spiralling around Carthy's plinky plonky guitar while Carthy tells the story of the lady who dressed up as a highwayman to find out if her boyfriend loves her as if it has never, ever been told before. Carthy always claims that the Treadmill song is the only prison folksong in the repertoire (because the collectors didn't go and talk to prisoners.) Someone in his audience in Wakefield pointed out that he almost certainly knew the Wakefield prison song: "Here we go round the mulberry bush on a cold and frosty morning." There apparently being a mulberry bush in the prison yard. Finished with Byker Hill; guitarist and fiddler singing about geordies wanting to buy beer. Doesn't get much folkier than that. 

When Jim Causley sings Summer Girls he introduces it by saying "I would tell you who it's by, but you'd just go "meh...Streets of London." I don't know if I would quite go "meh". Folkbuddy despises the song, apparently: it's just about spoiled middle class people going out at an looking at some poor people in order to make themselves feel better. I wouldn't go that far myself: it's a little sentimental ("in the same way that the sun is a little hot") but it's a nice enough melody, has some decent images ("looking at the world over the rim of his tea-cup") and "Cheer up, there is probably someone worse off than yourself" isn't a completely contemptible sentiment. If was going to take exception to something, it might have been First and Last Man, which seems to play on all the most patronising cliches about Native Americans ("I am the willing heathen / I worship everything / I will add new words to my language / But write them on the wind."). But as we've discussed before, songs and arguments, and it's presents a powerful enough story-world while you are inside it. But overall, I was a little underwhelmed by Ralph Mctell's set in St Georges (again) at the beginning of October. I felt that I should have liked him: he opened with I Been Doing Some Hard Travelling and says he is is old enough to have been Woody Guthrie's penpal. The distance from "in the shadow of the steeple, by the relief office, I saw my people" and "have you seen the old man who walks the streets of London" isn't infinite, come to think of it. (Guthrie never wrote back to him, being incarcerated in a mental hospital at the time. A lot of his banter involves dark twists like this: he introduces an impenetrable song about his mother by saying "she lives in a world adjacent to our own" and after the laugh, reveals that he meant that she had dementia. [*]) And then it's into a decent cover of Girl From the North Country and after a short but heartfelt tribute to Bob. (He's working on a song about Suzie Rotolo, which she won't hear, because she died earlier in the year.) But somehow, the evening never caught fire for me. I get the impression that McTell sees himself as a poet and some of the writing is of a pretty high order. The London Apprentice builds up a complicated metaphor about life based on, er, the streets of London, but is rather denser than I can take in at one hearing. 

I am a London apprentice I never learned her ways 

When I walk the streets of London I'm constantly amazed 

How a road I never was on before leads to one I know 

As any cabbie will tell you that's how all knowledge grows 

I enjoyed his meditation on time based on Bernstien's flashback in Citizen Kane ("it's funny the things a fella will remember"), but I question if the song actually said anything that Orson Welles hadn't already said almost as well. I did enjoy his closing number, the rocky "mythologisation" of the relationship between Bert Jansch and Annie Briggs. 

Bert died a few days later, of course. When I wrote that the Pentangle set at Glastonbury in June made a weekend of sinking up to my knees in mud worthwhile, I didn't realised that this would be the last but one time they would play together. 

Spiers and Boden did a pretty standard Spiers and Boden set at Colston Hall in September. Clearly, no-one can sing a ballad like Jon Boden and no-one can play the squeezebox like John Spiers and if you have never heard them you should, as they say, kill to get a ticket. But I couldn’t help noticing that the only number that I hadn’t heard them play before was New York Girls, which (the mighty) Bellowhead have made their own. Almost as if Bellowhead, which used to be about taking and embellishing songs which the duo had thrashed out is now the place where new material is being created. That's a shame, because much as I like t.m. Bellowhead, Jon's genius as a story teller and interpreterer of ballads is seen with more detail and nuance when accompanied only by fiddle, squeeze box or guitar. Maybe some of those 365 folksongs he sang last year could find their way into some fresh Spiers and Boden set? (What price a full dress Spiers and Boden rendering of the Lock Keeper, or the Mistletoe Bough, or Oor Hamlet, even? Not Rock Candy Mountains under any circumstances. That was a mistake.) Still, one should never pass up the opportunity to hear the story of Squire Willie and his psychotic hanging-mad employer; or to bellow along to the tale of Sir Rylas and the spotted pig; or to sing along to Sailing Down to Old Maui. With the exception of Carthy and Swarbs, they're the best folk duo going. I just hope the success of Bellowhead doesn't mean they are going to become fossilized.

The up and coming -- in fact very nearly already arrived -- Pilgrims Way did a free gig in the frankly uncongenial surroundings of Stokes Croft's very own Canteen, a sort of bar-restaurant-venue legally squatting in an open plan office. I mean, the whole point of the Canteen is "a bar with good live music", but I didn't think Lucy Wright's sweet vocals and excellent story telling was shown off to the best affect in an atmosphere where people were buying drinks and making a noise. Even if that's exactly the environment where The Hand Weaver and the Factory Maid, which she does brilliantly, was originally played. Although possibly not with a Jews Harp.