Overall Favourite Act of 2012

Nominations

Paul Sartin

Okay, maybe this column has an over preference for the single male voice singing the long narrative ballad; but two of my absolute musical highlights this year were Paul + Faustus singing the depressing song about the deserter who is flogged, shot and freed at the last minute by Prince Albert; and the rude one about the farmer who wants to show his girlfriend his threshing machine (by Steeleye Span and the Wurzels, respectively). His equally rude song about the other farmer showing off a male hen was the highpoint of the Bellowhead aftershow and with Paul Hutchinson as Belshazzrs Feast, he demonstrated that people can laugh at music without laughing at the music. He quotes, proudly, that someone said "no-one does misery like Paul Sartin". But no-one does a slightly bemused narrative humour like him, either.

Steve Knightley



Steve Knightley never fails. Whether he's riding a dodgy P.A system in a wet tent; winding up the last night of a new festival; bantering with an over-devoted hen-party; or just singing complicated, poetic songs that only give up their details on the second and third listening, he never fails to catch and channel and transmute the mood of the audience. Your Carthys and your Tabors may be "folk royalty"; but Knightley is folk's prime minister, its ambassador, almost the embodiment of where it is now.

And the winner is....

Special Award: The "Takes Out an Onion" Prize For Making The Judge Cry

Nominations

Woody Guthrie
For "This Land is Your Land" at Priddy Folk Festival

Chris Rickets
For "The Leaving of Liverpool" at Bristol Folk House

Luke Jackson 
For "The Big Hill", "Bakers Woods", "How Does It Feel", "Wayfarin' Stranger" and, well, everything, basically.

And the winner is...

Favourite New Song of 2012

Nominations

The Big Hill

by Luke Jackson 

on More Than Boys.

Hearing Luke singing this song at Frome was one of the hight points of my folk year; I vividly recall the moment when the meandering verse went into the big clear reflective refrain -- the exact moment at which the entire audience went from thinking "Oh, this act Steve Knightley has picked to support him is really pretty good" to "We are in the presence of the Next. Big. Thing."

It's not really a rite of passage song -- rite of passage songs are about young men whose mothers would rather they didn't take their guns to town, surely? Not even exactly a "growing up" song, either. More a "remembering the exact moment when you realized that something had slipped from the present to the past" song.  Sort of like Proust would have been if he'd had a guitar and been English and been writing about contemporary suburban adolescence.

Lord Douglas

by Jim Moray

on Skulk

Why, yes, I did also nominate this song in 2011, but as that was a for a "work in progress" at a live show and this is for the finished version on Skulk and on the (curiously disappointing, somehow) Cecil Sharp Project . It's open to question whether this is a "new song" or an "old song", anyway. The Radio 2 judges have put it in the "best traditional song" category, but it was sewn together out of multiple traditional versions -- and the tune, of course, is pure Moray.  (You might just as well ask if Prince Heathen is by Trad or by Martin Carthy, and as matter of fact, we have.)

It's a song you need to pay attention to; you seem to come upon a story that's already started and sort of overhear what's going on.  A relatively simple elopement story takes around nine minutes to unravel.  (The last time I heard Jim, perform it live, he took time in his opening spiel to explain the "curse" sub-plot, which made the whole thing a good deal easier to follow.) There is something almost of the pop ballad about the tune but the overall effect is one of massive antiquity, of staring down a long tunnel of time, and seeing mighty figures acting out their doomed love story in the far distance. Hearing this song is like reading La Morte D'Arthur for the first time.

Little Boy Blue 

by O'Hooley and Tidow

on The Fragile

"And you may now cross 'dead children' off your  O’Hooley and Tidow bingo card" tweeted Folkbuddy from the Bristol Folk Festival. There is certainly a morbidity to some of Belinda and Heidi’s music; they are not averse to covering Hill of Little Shoes, quite possibly the grimmest song ever written. On the other hand, if I'd written these awards yesterday or tomorrow I might have said that my favourite new song was their Day Trip -- a lovely life affirming piece about a day by the seaside.

Little Boy Blue is a piece of sentimental Victoriana about the toys which a kiddie leaves behind when he dies. It's been given a contemporary makeover; there's no sense of parody or superiority but it also manages not to cloy. The music is expressing grief in a slightly twenty first century idiom while the words remain those of the nineteenth; but the cumulative effect doesn't so much clash as enmesh, like a fugue, if that's the word I'm looking for.

The crowd-pleasers on the album are the slightly insubstantial Last Polar Bear and the rather too pleased with itself Gentleman Jack -- but Little Boy Blue is the kind of song which crawls along beside you. Two days later you’ll be vaguely humming "what has become of our little boy blue?" and not quite remembering why you feel so terribly, terribly sad.

And the winner is

Favourite Album of 2012

Nominations

Vice of the People
Albion Band

"It's had a new handle, and perhaps a new head, but it's still the old original axe." I don't know if anyone really thought that the name, access to the back catalogue and the presence Blair Dunlop ("I grew up in quite a folkie atmosphere") made these six young people the continuation of the legendary Albion band by other means. I heard them with a tiny audience in a tiny Bristol pub, and very good they were too, but possibly not being treated as Folk Royalty by the good people of Bristol. However, when they have produced material of this originality and quality — with an authentic folk-rock sound that's both slightly old fashioned and very contemporary -- their relationship to the original band is really neither here nor there. There are at least three stand out original tracks. Thieves Songs is a bitter political nursery rhyme; driven by lyrics and a beat. Wake a Little Wiser is explicitly a modern spin on Ragged Heroes (with maybe a structure that wandered in from the Black Joke?), which has the sense not to outstay its welcome. The remarkable How Many Miles To Babylon is another riff on a nursery rhyme, which turns out to be a ghost story -- why has no-one else tried to do a "night visiting" about a modern war? Blair Dunlop's voice is fresh and modern; Gavin Davenport is richer and older and folkier. On stage, the highlights are the rocked up morris instrumentals; on the CD, maybe the best thing is the fine traditional Adieu to Old England Adieu. But the album stands very successfully on its own two feet as a not-at-all-laboured conceptual argument about fame and wealth and what's going on in the land of Albion right now.

Skulk
Jim Moray

Is "enigmatic" the right word for this album? I didn't write about it when it first came out because, although I liked it I didn't think I'd understood it. As I've listened to it more I've enjoyed it more and more. And possibly understood it less and less.

Lazy critics always use expressions like "bad boy of folk" to describe Jim Moray, which might have been true if he hadn't done anything since 2004, but he has and it isn't. (The Independent talks about his "bleeps and beats" approach to folk, which is plain patronizing.) I do have a sense that since Low Culture (2009) he's done the pyrotechnics and mash-ups just about as well as that kind of thing can be done, and is now moving into a middle-period where he wants to be taken more seriously as a folk singer.

Skulk's actually not that traditional an album. "Hind Ettin" is one of those Tam Lin type stories about a lady who wanders off into a fairy wood and find that time has gone all wibbly; it starts off in full-on traddy mode -- voice, guitar, bit of fiddle, lady named Margaret who spends her time sewing silken seams -- but before long there are drums, reverbs, instrumental breaks, a total folk rock re-envisaging of the song. Very fine it is too. I sometimes say of performers like Martin Carthy and Jon Boden that they are primarily story tellers; Jim is primarily a music-maker. I found some of the ballads quite demanding: on a first listen I kept losing track of what the lady was doing in the woods or who and given which golden glove to whom. On the other hand there is magical sparkle to his singing -- there is a moment where he tells us that the lady's fairy son starts to play a magic flute and I can somehow hear centuries of fairy yarn spinners behind his voice. It segues directly into a piece of traditional banjo Americana which turns out to be a reworking of an electric piece by someone called Fleetwood Mac, and I would so have known that without being told. Hawkstone Grange is so traditional that it's almost parody; the Hog Eye Man, which is I think a sea shanty, is dressed up as rock and role. Some of the material wrong foots me:  a pro-Napoleon lament called "The Eighteenth of June" is almost a piece of conceptual art, all echoes and ambient noise. "Why is he singing this so incredibly slowly?" I asked, but a quick search revealed another version (by the frequently aforementioned Mr Carthy) is taken at roughly the same pace. It's the sort of tune you only notice three days after you listened to it. Haunting.
The best things on the albums are the ones most simply in his own voice; "Seven Long Years" puts his own tune to "Bay of Biscay" (another one of those night visiting songs about a sailor visiting his lover and then revealing that he's dead).

I think his previous albums sometimes felt schizophrenic, as if there was a famous old song over here  and a drum machine, and apple mac and an a hip-hop artist over here but that Skulk is trying to put the the two sides together. He clearly isn't one of those people who says "Oh, it's all just music": folk seems to be a sufficiently privileged, magical concept for it to be worth dusting down and reworking dusty old ballads into a new thing, but I'm not quite sure what that new thing is.

Dear Andrew

You are making things very complicated. Please delete above and replace with:

"This is a nice album, with good stories, pretty tunes, and clever arrangements. I liked it very much indeed."

Andrew

More Than Boys
Luke Jackson

A soldier travels home to break the news to the family of a friend that he's been killed; a man plays footie in the park with his son; a teenager remembers climbing trees when he was little; a young man remembers hanging out with his mates when he was a teenager, moans that his siblings are all having a better time than him; and sees himself for the first time from his parents point of view. A group of youths go fishing without a care in the world. Eleven perfect songs from an artist who is still a teenager himself. I don't know what the young people make of them but from my elderly perspective they seem to have distilled the very essence of a teenager's life.

And the winner is...

Martyn Joseph / Luke Jackson

Colston Hall

"Where's Luke," calls out someone from the audience, just as Martyn Joseph is about to start his first encore ("No Retreat Baby, No Surrender" played exquisitely on a ukulele). Naturally, Martin takes this as cue to start taking the mickey out of his young protege..."Where's Luke? I fired him, that's where he is...It's my show...."

All bands engage in this kind of banter: I imagine it's the only thing which keeps them sane on a tour. But I couldn't help wondering whether the veteran really did feel a bit upstaged by the newbie. The previous night, Mike Harding had named Luke Jackson as a finalist in the Young Folk Awards (which was pretty much a foregone conclusion) and also as a nominee for the Horizon Award (which Luke says came as a complete surprise to him -- he thought at first they'd read his name out in the wrong category.) I do wonder what percentage of the audience were there to hear the support rather than the act.

Luke's first proper tour doesn't seem to have diminished the sincerity or honesty of his performance, although it's a much tighter set than I've seen him do before, cutting a lot of the chat and showcasing the different kinds of songs he can turn his guitar hand to. So it's not only the touching, biographical ones tonight: he starts and finishes with the abstract, rocky ones, and in between gives us a new bluesy one, and a gospel cover, and a narrative ballad as well as the bitter-sweet country-ish title track off his album. Only at the very end of the concert, in that final encore with Martyn, does he look back on his childhood and break our hearts as only he can.

It really does feel as if we are watching a career in fast forward -- he's already thinking about his second album -- and it's honestly hard to imagine where Luke Jackson is going to be in twelve months time. 

As to Martyn Joseph himself: he's entirely new to me, and I never feel confident in forming an opinion of a singer songwriter on the basis of a single listen. A splendid showman, definitely, who carries off a lot of slightly eighties mannerisms with some aplomb (He keeps addressing the audience as "Bristol", and comes down off the stage and stands on a chair at one point.) Not a gospel singer or a "Christian" artist, but there's a pretty strong streak of the religious running through his act. "This is not a good time for God", he sings "The right wing have defaced, the left wing have displaced, bigotry's disgraced..." It sounds a bit like Dylan's Material World and treads a fine line between the witty and the preachy. ("I'm looking forward to singing this in America" he says, after the first chorus which can't decide if it's "Allah" or "Allelujah".) Okay, I compare everyone with Dylan, but a performer who happily says things like "The sun remains an adoration flame / In spite of what these dungeons days proclaim" probably deserves it. (I think I detect a Dylanesque drawl in several of the songs, but at the end of the evening he goes into a very funny mimic of the great man.) 

A singer I haven't heard before proves his worth if there's at least one song which punches me firmly between the eyes. Martyn passes this test with flying colours: Proud Valley Boy is an astonishing, complex, rant in which an old miner looks back on Paul Robeson's visit to Wales in the 1930s. It has some re-world thoughts about unemployment ("It was one of those retraining schemes--a room full of discarded dreams") and a powerful central metaphor: 

A dragon came here once 

He shone like ebony 

At Mountain Ash and Neath 

He gave us dignity 

Back home some cursed his name 

And tried to quench his fire 

This David and Goliath in one frame. 

He talks about a musical torch being passed from Woody to Dylan to Springsteen, and there's certainly a strain of the angry blue collar industrial rant in several of his songs. He seems to like the oblique mythologising of the relatively ordinary: there are also several dragons wandering around On This Celtic Morning, a song about, of all things, the Ryder Cup. I wouldn't have expected a song about golf to work, but it really, really does, presumably because the singer really, really cares about golf. ("And the gods who play before us / somehow carry all our names / as tall as any mountain / but not bigger than the game") 

But he also does a nice line in soft, reflective ballads. I was genuinely touched by Clara, the apparently true story of an old man being saved from suicide by the old lady who had taken care of him when he was a baby. 

I hope we all have a Clara

Who sings us songs unknown 

Songs for the healing
And songs for the coming home.

Martyn is the sort of singer who produces a sequence of little epics; songs which imbue their subjects  with importance and significance; songs which take you on a journey. I must admit, though, that while any one of the anthemic songs was terrific, by the end of the set I felt I had possibly got the hang of the fact that Love was a good thing and he was in favour of it. 

This evening was the real thing. A young man with a guitar and pure, fresh voice wailing "I'm only going over Jordan..." and an older man with a darker, more world-weary voice growling "Mr Robeson, Sir...I hope that Tiger Woods knows your name". I have, as you know, nothing whatsoever against huge groups of musicians having elaborate, festal parties on the stage. But Bellowhead have never once made me cry.

More Than Boys

Luke Jackson
Pipe Records

How old was John Lennon when he wrote Strawberry Fields Forever? Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? Dylan wasn't much younger when he wrote Bob Dylan's Dream. Luke Jackson is 18: presumably he was 17 when he wrote most of the songs on this album. There are lots of growing up songs and growing up poems and growing up stories in the world. (Some people say that all stories are growing up stories.) But I am struggling to think of another example of a singer who has written a good song -- a whole album of good songs -- about growing up while they are still living in that moment;  a 17-year-old telling us what 17 feels like from the inside.

It's quite hard for me to put into words just how much I like this album; it's so unselfconscious and honest that analysing it feels like using a sledgehammer to describe a spider's web. When Luke signed my copy of his EP at the Frome festival, I said "Your songs are very true" and I'm not sure if I am going to think of anything more helpful to say in the next few paragraphs. At the Trowbridge festival I heard a nice man in the club tent singing a nice version of John Denver's nice song "Will I Ever Catch Another Butterfly" and I caught myself thinking: none of that is true, you didn't really think that, you just wrote it down because its the sort of thing people say about their childhood in songs. But when Luke sings...

Hours in our hideout, safe from the winter breeze
Yes and I, well I wonder if it's still standing up there, at the top of Old Wives Lees
And it's where we'd talk about our first loves, with our hearts worn on our sleeves
It turned out we were far too young, to really know what any of that means...

...I instantly believe it, and instantly know what he's talking about. The most personal is always the most universal: we all have our own Bakers Woods, Old Wives Lees and Kitchener Roads, and we all have moments when we long to return to them. But although there's a wistfulness to these songs, they never become mawkish. The singer regrets the passing of his days of doing nothing in the park ("It seems like all my childhood songs have been sung") but suddenly interrupts himself mid-line to wonder about "the person I will be". It's that shift from looking back to looking forward which raises the songs several notches above the merely sentimental.

I've said before that what is most affecting about Luke's live performances is the way that he shifts between lyricism and ordinary language; a deep, mature, astonishingly pure singing voice, but songs which are phrased like day-to-day speech; chatty local turns of phrase ("six young men had a day down the lakes" "down by the rec where he spent most his time") which are embedded in little poems. These are the kind of songs which seem to catch a thought at the moment at which it happens. We seem to hear the singer doodling away on his guitar, maybe resorting to some slightly conventional singery songwritery language ("made me smile to hear the birds singing the sweetest lullaby by / the world was looking fine, oh so fine, through my eyes") and then suddenly realising what he has to say --

down at the wood side with my two allies,
none of us sure how to spend our time
thinking about life, and so we climb, oh we climbed

My two allies. That nails, that pins down, that captures the flavour of boyhood friendship perfectly. "I'd do anything just to climb, side by side, one more time, with my two allies." Perfect.

I wouldn't like to choose a favourite song. Clearly and rightly he's pushing "More Than Boys", the title track as a possible "hit". But I think the cleverest and most complex and moving thing on the album is "How Does It Feel?" Someone who can speak music can maybe explain the melody better than I can: the opening stanzas with their long, meandering lines "...she has bloomed to your girl and your have the ambition for her to try to conquer the world..."; the refrain which keeps changing direction and catching me out, but which has an almost hymnal quality about ("how does it feel to see your children grow and face the world?") and just when he think we're finished, the simple and wise full stop:

kiss us at the door and wish us luck
because we all grow up

But here's the thing: this is not a growing up song in which a young man tells us what it feels like to leave home, but a growing up song in which a young man imagines what it feels like for his parents to see him leave home...but which then twists round and notices that his parents must have left their parents too. And that plain-English voice comes right through:

you have been here before, with your bag, beer and fags you decided to sneak out the door
but they stayed to watch you grow, gritted their teeth as you became someone they didn't know.

I think that catches a really powerful and universal moment: seeing yourself as an adult for the first time because you can see for the first time that your parents were once children. And it's one of those melodies that I don't want to listen to very often in case I spoil it.

One of the things I like most about folk music is the way in which each performer seems to invite you into their own little world of interconnected songs. This album draws you into a landscape of orchards and broken bicycles and muddy rivers and playing fields and fishing lakes; on the border between the city and the country; a very modern, very English pastoral that's both happy and sad because our guide realises that he's leaving it behind. I've been milking the gag about folk songs being about how much better things seemed in the olden days for far too long. These are songs written in the space between the olden days and the future:  honest, wise and very, very true.

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.

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

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