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

SPECIAL AWARDS

Special Takes Out an Onion Award for making the judge cry


*Sean Lakeman and Kathryn Roberts
for Joe Peel at Bristol Folk Festival

*Steve Knightley, Fisherman's Friends and the entire company, but this time chiefly yourselves,
for Cousin Jack, also at Bristol Folk Festival

*Chris Wood
for Hard, Jersualem, and Hollow Point (duh!) at Colston Hall, 21 Oct 2011

WINNER
That miserable bastard Chris Wood.

Special Well, He Ought To Be More Careful With His Boats Award for Best Famous Dead Canadian Singer-Songwriter Who Everyone Else Had Heard Of But The Judge Only Started Listening To This Year.


*Chris Ricketts
for Stan Rogers' Northwest Passage (on Port of Escape)

*Blackbeards Tea Party
for Stan Rogers' Barret's Privateers (on Tomorrow We'll Be Sober)

*Jon Boden
for Stan Rogers' Loch Keeper (on a Folksong A Day)

WINNER
Stan Rogers for Stan Rogers' Mary Ellen Carter,

which, in a rare show of unanimity, the readers of this blog voted "single best song ever written by anyone about anything ever".







Special Award for the Judge's Coolest Music Related Moment Of 2011

* Lustily and tuneless singing along with Fishemen's Friends singing Cousin Jack in the mud at the Pyramd Stage at Glastonbury, and noticing that Steve Knightley was standing next to him

* Standing on York station, desperately hoping that the old gentleman with the guitar case to whom he has just said "We really enjoyed your set, sir, such a shame you were so far from the audience" really had been Martin Carthy. (Or if, indeed, he had dreamt the whole incident.)

* Hearing the astonishing Emily Portman singing wonderful mysterious whispy ethereal fairy tale ballads in the upstairs room of the Louisiana Bristol, and realising that the audience consisted of eleven people, including the judge, the judge's Folkbuddy, Peter Lord and Jim Moray.

* The aforemetnioned Martin Carthy singing Bob Dylan's Dream on the Radio 2 tribute programme. (Bob Dylan having originally based the song on Martin Carthy's version of Lord Franklin's Lament.)

* Hearing The Pentangle doing a set consisting entirely of traddy classics at Glastonbury, unaware that this was the last but one performance Bert Jansch would give.

WINNER

No award. You can't give an award for something sad.








Special Judas Award For Best Live Performance of a Bob Dylan Song

*Phil Beer
for Seven Curses at Bristol Folk Festival

*June Tabor and the Oyster Band
for Seven Curses at St Georges Hall Bristol, Nov 1

*Martin Simpson
for North Country Blues at Chapel Arts, Bath, Oct 22

*Ralph McTell
for Girl from the Noth Country at St Georges, Bristol, 29 SepBob Dylan
for Man in the Long Black Coat at Cardiff Arena, Oct 13

WINNER

Martin Simpson.

It's shame Dylan didn't sing Seven Curses, so I could have had an award for "the best live performance of Dylan's Seven Curses."








Special  Geldof Award For the Best Live Performance By An Artist Named Bob

The judge unanimously gave the award to Bob Dylan's show in Cardiff Arena.

The first night of an opera is generally judged a failure unless a sizable proportion of the audience boo; similarly, the Poet Laureate of Rock and Roll wouldn't have done a show unless some people claimed to have walked out of it. It is widely believed that Bob's promoters fill the back rows with an anti-claque who are only there so they can leave after the opening number.

It must be admitted that, in order to understand Dylan's current approach to his muse (a.k.a "whatever the hell it is he thinks he's doing nowadays") you need to

a: have heard at least three albums since MTV Unplugged

b: Be reasonably familiar with his lessor known material (NOTE: Knowing some of the words to Like a Rolling Stone doesn't count)

c: Be sitting or standing in the front five rows.

If you fulfil all those criteria, than you will be treated to a Robert Zimmerman becoming in his autumn years the artist I am convinced he has always wanted to be – the bluesy, rock-a-billy song and dance man, grinning and mincing and riffing and colluding with the audience.

In short: this was the gig I am most likely to tell my non-existent grandchildren about.

"But Andrew, would you have praised this very strange show so highly if you had never heard of Bob Dylan?"

"If I had never heard of Bob Dylan then I would never have heard any of Bob Dylan's songs. Under those circumstances, if this grizzled old man in a sweaty cowboy hat had snarled into a small venue and started growling, I would have said 'What marvellous songs...get me a pen and paper, these may be the greatest lyrics that have ever been written...what fantastic tunes...what a weird-arse way of singing them."

Which is precisely what everyone has been saying about Dylan since approximately 1959

Special Muddy Wellington Boot Award For The Most Idiosyncratic Venue

*The Canteen, Stokes Croft

The Canteen, a sort of perfectly legal squat in a disused open plan office, is allegedly the creative hub of the coolest, most creative street in England, or, if you believe the Bristol Evening Post, the place where crusty hippy commies hang out who ought to get a job and be forced to eat Tescos sandwiches and Banksy ought to be flogged like they did to that kid who painted graffiti on Singapore. I digress. One of the Canteens U.S.Ps, apart from real ale and very decent food at very reasonable prices (you get a free bowl of soup with a meal, which is a really civilised touch) is live music -- I've heard both the aforementioned Pilgrims' Way and the not yet mentioned Hoddamadoddery there.

Well, "heard" is a slight overstatement: it's a bar. People are right up near the stage trying to finish designing their websites on the Macbooks, or with their course work on Brecht spread out in front of them; or else they are drinking and trying to have a conversation with their mates, wondering when the distracting noise at the front is going to stop. This probably works very well with that loud electrical rhythm stuff that the young people allegedly like but which no-one actually wants to listen to in the first place, but it's really not the environment in which to hear Pilgrims' Way telling you about the hand weaver who fell in love with the factory maid. Not sure what the solution is. Shame.


*Scarborough Open Air Theatre

Plastic, football stadium style seating. Numbered seats, although this didn't make much difference, because the arena was about ¼ full. A river, possibly the river Derwent, running through the complex, separating the audience from the stage. The impact of Bellowhead is slightly numbed when they are several miles away from you, and with the best will in the world, its hard to get the nuances of the aforementioned Jim Moray doing the aforementioned Lord Douglas in that environment. During the Demon Barber's set, a man with a guitar ambled through the audience who were, by this time, standing on the tarmac near the rail. He turned out to be Martin Carthy.

*Green Note Cafe, Camden Town

About 100 yards from Cecil Sharp House itself. Fits 50, of whom about 20 can sit down. Admission only granted to people who know a special hand shake (I made that up). If you want to sit, you need to buy a ticket AND book a table and eat. If you want a table near the stage, you have to form a queue at 6, and take you seat at 7, in plenty of time for the music at 9. In return, you get to hear Martin Carthy, Alasdair Roberts, Robin Williamson in surroundings that redefine the word "intimate". I love this place to bits.



WINNER

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. .

Bristol Folk Festival

This weekend I have



1: Drunk Gem Ale
2: Worn flowers in my hair (artificial)
3: Danced (there may be photographic evidence)
4: Drunk Gem Ale
5: Eaten three different kinds of hamburger
6: Played a hammered dulcimer ("You might want to hold those sticks by the other end")
7: The flowers, I mean, not my hair
8: Laughed (e.g at the little man singing about busking, and at Phil Beer's joke about the nerd in the music shop.)
9: Cried (about Joe Peel, John Ball and (actual proper sobs) Cousin Jack)
10: Points 1, 4 and 9 may be related.
11: Joined in, frequently.
12: Worn a union jack tie
13: Seen Steve Knightley dancing along to Remember You're A Womble
14: Seen Jim Moray playing his accordion in the bar
15: Seen English people queueing politely for the bar
16: Drunk Gem ale.

Friday Afternoon and Evening

Officially, the Bristol Folk Festival started at noon on Friday, although there was no scheduled music until three. Until then you could hang around and buy kaftans and hammered dulcimers and having your feet nibbled by fish, though. There were two men dressed as Wallace and Grommit outside the theatre. Whatever anyone else may say Wallace and Grommit are from Bristol. And Banksy. And Blackbeard. And Cary Grant. There was also the biggest collection of Morris Dancers ever assembled in captivity. One of the best things about the festival was hearing the tinkling of tiny bells and noticing that the person behind you in the queue at the bar was in full Morris regalia.

Oh, what foreigners must think of us, and how little we care!

However, I think the festival really began at 8.15PM, when Three Daft Monkeys, (a sort of sub-Bellowhead gypsy influenced dance band) performed a song about the legend of the Strasburg dancing-plague -- when lots of people supposedly developed a mental illness which meant that they heard music in their heads and couldn't stopped dancing to it. "They danced, they danced, they danced, they danced..." went the refrain. "Can you guess what they did then?" asked vocalist Tim Ashton? "They danced...they danced...they danced". Now, this isn't precisely my kind of thing. I'm more in my comfort zone when it's a guy with a guitar telling me he wants to share a very old story, about a lady, probably one sitting in a tower, very probably sewing a silken seam. Never mind. Everyone was seated, in a very English decorum Westminster Abbey kind of way. We worked out that the closest we could get to dancing...and dancing...and dancing...was swaying...and swaying...and swaying....in time with the music. We swayed. A couple in the front row got up and bopped vaguely. And then two people started dancing. It was perhaps more a tango than a waltz. Didn't matter. We were at a folk festival. And the folk were dancing. Dancing in the aisles....

Actually, I'd already had two personal highlights by that point. The first group on the main stage were Sean "Seth's Brother" Lakeman and Kathryn Roberts. Initially, I thought they were going to be a bit shouty and electric for my taste. But two numbers in, Kathryn announced that she was going to sing her favourite song "which I learned from the singing of June Tabor." (And there is no better place the world to learn you favourite song.) This was a lovely deep expressive cover of a Pete Bond's Joe Peel, the beautiful terrible ballad in praise of an ordinary life. "You'd never have believed it you'd known / How many people mourned your going / And how lucky folks still feel / To say they knew Joe Peel". Broke my heart all over again. Really. She also did her own, rather brilliant modern song in the persona of a coal-miner, explaining to his wife why its his duty to join the strike, even though their livelihood is going to fall apart.




I was indifferent to Phoenix River Band – local sub-American electrical country rock, although I did enjoy the mock dust bowl ballad about praying to God for rain.

But next up (we didn't stir from the main hall for much of Friday) was Jim Moray, one of my utter favourite performers. Rather surprised he wasn't a bigger draw, actually, although it was early in the festival and he was up against the reasonably large name Bella Hardy in the other hall.

To be honest, I am indifferent to some of his electrical jiggery pokery. He had an apple mac on the stage ("just need to check my e-mail") and was doing clever things like sampling his voice on the spot, so that he ended up singing multi-part harmonies with himself. All jolly clever, but I don't think his voice needs that kind of enhancement. (Not that the electrical stuff and weird traddy/ hip-hop mashups on the Low Culture album aren't brilliant, or course.) He's at his best sitting at the piano singing the cod-traditional Poverty Knock -- often done as light Morris style sing a long, (Poverty poverty knock / My loom it is singing all day-oh / Poverty poverty knock / The gaffers too stingy to pay-oh) but here a mournful lament to a life wasted in the factory; or standing with the guitar to draw out the melody of the Rufford Park Poachers or yet another version of the Cruel Sister. ("Here's a song about beating your sister to death with a stick and throwing her body in the river".) I find his voice impossible to describe: I keep resorting to words like "choirboy" "innocent" "cheeky" "ethereal" -- the album covers with him as a kind of nature spirit somehow seem appropriate. There's a perpetual catch in his voice, as if the story of Lord Bateman's love for the King of Turkey's daughter or the three poachers murder trial is bubbling up from inside him, or as if it's so sad he can hardly bare to sing it. He really is something extremely special and unusual. And he clearly loves the traditional song book enough to muck around with it.

I can't remember one thing about Ruarri Joseph, so I assume I didn't like him very much.

The headline act, Seth Lakeman, I hadn't ever heard him before. He's the patron of the festival, and very popular. I'm afraid he was the one low point of the weekend for me. I just didn't quite see the point of him. Certainly, he's a mean fiddle player, and the climax of his main set, doing that faster-and-faster -and-faster blazing fiddles thing, was quite exciting. Intellectually, I understand what this kind of music is meant to be doing: my heart is supposed to beat in time with the rhythm (horror movie makers try the same trick, I am told) and this is supposed to make me so excited that I want to dance to it. All as theoretical as some of that young people's electrical drum and guitar music I've occasionally heard. (Nick made me listen to someone called The Wedding Present last year. Very interesting they were, but I kept thinking "I wish he'd send this nasty band away and let me listen to the obviously quite clever lyrics.") Of anthropological interest only: the main lyrics were clarly based on traditional folksongs, but it was so overwhelmed by rhythm that he could have been singing anything at all. Do folkies like this kind of thing, or is he "the folk musician for people who don't really like folk music?" I quite like the Pogues and seem to remember enjoying Gogol Bordello a year or three back, so clearly electric noise and folk can be brought together in ways I like. He went down very well with the rest of the audience.

Saturday Afternoon

Arrived about 12. Folkbuddies inform me that I have missed the first spontaneous full on standing ovation of the weekend, for Wildflowers, a trio consisting of three children around the age of thirteen (two fiddles and a guitar). They do a spontaneous set in the bar later in the evening, and they do indeed seem to be astonishing.

I start the day in the upstairs bar where the always reliable Hodmadoddery are applying their inventive guitar stylings to John Barleycorn -- and what better way is there of feeling that it is really spring and you are really at a folkfest then by listening to two men with guitars singing John Barleycorn in a bar? This is followed by an open night. The standard is extremely high, as you'd expect. She has a beautiful voice, but isn't at all confident on the the guitar (says me, who can't play a note). A young girl named Catherine Holt, accompanied by her father on the guitar, looks fantastically nervous, and then delivers a flawless, and quite emotive cover of the Soldier and the Princess.

Folkbuddies went off to see the Mummers Play about the life of Brunel. (If you don't know what a Mummers play is, it's part way between Morris Dancing and a pantomime. If you don't know who Brunel was, then, all you need to know is that he came from Bristol. They said it was great.) I stayed in the bar to hear a band called the Bristol Shantymen, because they come from Bristol and sing sea shanties. They were stunning. Not because they sang great tunes, were a decent choir, and had one man with a rather weak voice but who was brilliant at doing the funny lines and the silly long-drawn out yodels, but because they really, really, really, really, cared about the history of sea shanties. They could tell you about particular old sailors who used to sing these songs in pubs in the 60s. They cared about which songs were specific to Bristol and which came from elsewhere. They sang a shanty with the "call" lines in French but the "response" lines in English, because that's how French sailors sung it. They loved their material. It oozed authenticity and love for tradition. This is the kind of thing I'm here for.

Had to take a bet on whether I'd be more likely to enjoy Mabon("interceltic funk folk") or Pilgrim's Way ("gimmick free folk at it's finest) in the smaller Fred Wedlock stage (named after Bristol's oldest swinger in town.) Naturally went for Pilgrim's Way. They ran though some very adequate versions of traditional songs (Weaver and the Factory Made, Tarry Trousers) before utterly blowing us all away with the songs which gave the band its name. They called it "a great humanist song" but I must admit that during the compulsory "all join in" bit, I sang "The people Lord, thy people are good enough to me" (as opposed to "the people, oh the people"). Because that's what Kipling wrote. What a great poem! It deserves to be far better known than the horrible "If..." And what a stonking tune Peter Bellamy made up for it. I have occasionally thought that a couplet from might stand very well at the top of this very blog:
And when they bore me over-much, I shall not shake my ear
Recalling many thousand such whom I have bored to tears
And if they labour to impress, I shall not laugh or scoff
Since I myself have done no less and sometimes pulled it off

Phil King has a big local following. Lots of people clapped him. I could really take him or leave him. He can play his guitar, no doubt about that, but his voice doesn't excite me, and his songs seem.... Artificial. Inauthentic. It reminds me of that review of Virginia Woolf, where the reviewer wanted to shout "No, she didn't!" after every line of the novel. Apparently, when the singer was stung by a scorpion, it reminded him that Orion, the only constellation he can recognise, died from scorpion wound, and that he feels as if that hunter has somehow watched over him through his life. "No, he doesn't!" 

Other people seemed to like him a lot.

Caught the very end of Elfynn in the main hall. They appeared to be rather good.

Sunday

I have done a bad thing.

Last night I drunked beer, and this morning I woke up feeling distinctly woozy, and found that I had nothing in the fridge for breakfast. What a shame there isn't some kind of, I don't know, supermarket at the bottom of my road. (OH! YOU CAD! YOU BOUNDER!) So I walked in via Cabots Circus and taken breakfast in, er, McDonalds. Not a very traditional way to greet the first day of May.

Apparently some of the Morris sides really did get up before the break of day-oh to great the May-oh at 4AM on the patch of grass behind the shopping mall-oh. (Fay Hield tells us later that the Newcastle's version involves washing you face in the May-dew, or, since the park in question is much frequented by pet-owners, the May-poo.) My enthusiasm doesn't extend quite that far, but when I get to Colston Hall, the seating has been removed from the main auditorium, and various groups are hey-nonny-no-ing away. 

Some ladies are doing rapper dancing in doc martin boots, with a caller in a top hat. Another all-female group are doing something possibly connected to a May Pole dance, holding long flowery sticks in the air and making arches; followed by one of those ones where they bash sticks together. There is tiny girl of about eight, who seems to be as good a stick-basher as any of the others. A male group leaps around and waves hankies in the air. "Before we go, can I draw your attention to this spot" says the old-timer who leads the group, pointing to one of the places from which seating has been removed. "That's where I was sitting when Bob Dylan played the Colston Hall in 1966." 

Yeah. There can be nu-folk and folk-rock and punk-folk and people I wouldn't swear were folksingers at all but I deeply respect and approve the way the festival has tried to establish links with the old, the traditional, and, indeed, the silly. 

Dyer Cummings, who I have never heard of, were a nice bouncy dancy band, who played a lot of infectious tunes with the usual fiddle-accordion-guitar combo, but topped out the set by leading the audience with an akapella John Ball (the aforementioned Sydney Carter carol about the preacher who was killed for supporting the Peasants Revolt). "Are all Protestant hymns like that?" asked Folkbuddy.

Only caught a little bit of today's Open Mic but I was glad I did. Tony O'Hare is a guitarist who haunts local folk clubs. He sang a silly ballad about the brouhaha that blew up a year or so back when a wartime bomb was discovered in the river (it turned out to be a supermarket trolley, of course). And a song about busking all day and earning "six quid and a banana". And splendid piece about MPs expenses, with increasingly preposterous Dylanesque rhymes for "sleaze". (The joke was compounded because the song used the harmonica riff from Lilly, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, and I would totally have noticed that if Folkbuddy hadn't pointed it out.) He wasn't the best writer, singer or guitarist of the weekend. But he came the closest to embodying my idea of what a "folk-singer" ought to be like: a guy ploughing his furrow in the bar, playing to anyone who'll listen and trying to make them laugh. (He was also clearly a believer in Tom Lehrer's maxim that singing 50 verses is twice as enjoyable as singing 25). And he was the person during the weekend who most strongly made me think: "I want to learn to do that." 

And thence to the main hall for the sellider (pronounced "barn dance) led by, get this Spiers and Boden. (That's like saying that you've waltzed to Yehudi Menuhin, isn't it?) There is in existence photographic evidence of me on my feet, wondering what a willow is and why one might want to split one, whether I am couple one or couple two, and precisely which is my left and which is my right. I may have initiated a couple of collisions. Folkbuddy 2, I hear, caused a major pile up. Folkbuddy claims to have taken a superb picture of Folkbuddy 2 and I, but found no evidence of it on her camera when she got home, and has therefore supplied the above line drawing. Jon Boden sang the one about the spotty pig, but mostly, the two Jo(h)ns just played perfectly bounced tunes, with ebbing and flowing rhythms that you can't help dancing to. Well, or badly, as the case may be. 

The Fay Hield Trio I almost overlooked, owing the fact that the programme decided helpfully to tell me which other artists her record label published, rather than the salient fact the other two members of the trio were Robert Harbron (as in "Kerr, Fagan and") and Sam Sweeny. That is to say: one of the best squeeze box men in the business and one of the best fiddlers in business. "Sam is in another group called...." explained Fay. "Bellowhead!" shouted the audience. "Kerfuffle!" I suggested. Actually, the trio could usefully have been billed as "a bit like Kerfuffle", in that you had virtuoso fiddling and melodian-ary behind exquisite female vocals, doing traddy material like King Henry and nearly traddy stuff like Oak, Ash and Thorn. (Mr Kiplings Poem, set to music by Peter Bellamy, who may have been mentioned before and may indeed be mentioned again.) Fay Hield is Jon Boden's partner. The last day of the festival was, as you might expect, Bellowhead-centric. 

The small hall was a very nice space when it was half empty: you could sit on the floor or lean against walls -- but when there was nothing going on in the main hall, it got awfully crowded and became "standing room only". Balshazzar's Feast perform seated, so I only got a glimpse of the tops of their heads. This was a little frustrating, as it meant that one could hear frequent ripples of laughter from the front three rows who were (I assume) the only people who could see what were (I assume) hilarious on-stage antics. So I can 't say whether I would have found them terribly funny or (as I suspect) terribly irritating. I will certainly try to hear them again and see them for the first time at some point. 

This was really the only logistical issue over the whole weekend. People formed neat, British queues without any rioting at all outside the main hall before the headline acts, but actually I think this was hardly necessary. For Bellowhead on Sunday night, frixample, everyone in the standing area mosh pit could see perfectly, and anyone who wanted to be there could be. 

(Question: Why does Belshazzar's Feast use an image of two heads on platters on their album cover? Surely that was Herod? Belshazzar's was the fellow with the writing on the wall?)

Sheelanagig, preceded Bellowhead on the main stage. I could take them or leave them. They were clearly very good. I think it was slightly ill-judge to precede Bellowhead with a rhythmn based klezmer (didn't look it up, taking a shot in the dark) party band. However good they were (and Folkbuddy observed a small child, just in front of our party, who seemed likely to explode with excitement) they weren't going to be as good as Bellowhead. I suppose having gone to the trouble of clearing out all the chairs, it made sense to have another band people could dance to to. I'd maybe have preferred a total contrast. This was the only point where I felt I was watching a support act and waiting for the main group to come on. 

Bellowhead are fantastic. Bellowhead are always fantastic. It is their job to be fantastic. There is plenty of space in the main hall, so people can stand if they want to. They can jump in the air to Frogs Legs and Dragons Teeth. They can indicate with their fingers whether Jack is up to the rigs or down to the jigs of London town. They can shake their heads in time with the Slo Gin set. There are rumours, in fact, that Bristol's Only Celebrity Folk Blogger (TM) may have attempted to few faltering polka steps with Bristol Leading Citizen Folk Journalist (TM) during Oh You New York Girls, Can You Dance The? Jon Boden eschews witty banter, and simply sings. When I first heard it in the Old Vic last year, I had my doubts about Port of Amsterdam, but I now think it's the best thing he does. A signature song. He seems to be in melancholic agony every time he sings it. He sings about the girl who will only marry the lord if he can answer six questions ("and that is three times two") as if no such song as ever been sung before, seeming to scratch his head and think for a moment before realizing that the cock was the first bird that did crow and the dew did first downfall. There is just the faintest trace of surprise in his face when he tells us that the finest month in all the year is the merry, merry month of May, as if he has only just noticed that he's singing the song on May Day. I still think that there are moments when the performance blots out the song: The Two Magicians ("wizard copulation") is too good a story to get lost amongst the ska style brass (I looked it up) -- and we only get to sing bide lady bide (there's nowhere you can hide a couple of times. But the Broomfield Wood utterly remains a folk song. You can hear the pique in the horse's voice when he's blamed for not waking up the sleeping lord. And Jon chews up the furniture for Cholera Camp, as always. ("Theeee chaplain's got a banjo....!") (Cholera Camp, Pilgrim's Way, Oak, Ash and Thorn: we have rather been followed around by Mr Bellamy's interpretations of Mr Kipling this weekend. You can't listen to Folk Song a Day and not realise what high regard Boden holds Peter Bellamy in.) The stage sprays the audience with confetti during the final number. With their songs about lusty blacksmiths seducing shape shifting wizards, and knights falling into magical sleeps in broomfield woods, and jolly sailors being ripped off by jolly prostitutes, and jolly prostitutes being ripped off by jolly sailors, and happy beggars, Bellowhead are, in their highly idiosyncratic way, painting a picture of yet another England. It is not clear with their piratical stylings are intended to impart a john barleycornish new life to Merrie Englande, or if they are actually taking the piss out of the whole thing. Probably both at once. 

The bar stays open after the show finishes. It hasn't run out of beer. (When I first saw the revamped Colston Hall, I thought "Why have they attached an airport lounge to the theater." It has grown on me. How many theaters are there where you can get a drink after the show?) Someone starts playing the fiddle. Half-a-dozen ladies in civvies get out their rappas and start dancing; another lady, starts calling out the moves, just like she was doing, in her top hat, on the floor of Colston Hall this morning. The bar-staff turn off the lights as if they want us to leave, and then possibly think better of it and turn them on again. The rappa-ing finished, a guy and a girl start unselfconsciously doing leap-in-the-air scottish country dance steps. Someone produces an accordion to accompany them: it turns out to be Jim Moray. (Twenty minutes earlier, he'd been up on the main stage, giving Bellowhead the Froots prize for Best Album of 2010 in his capacity as winner of the best album of 2009. Hedonism was, incidentally, no way the best album of 2010. I think he regularly plays the squeeze box for Nonesuch Morris.) 

In the end, Bellowhead is a party: a party going on on stage, to which the audience is invited. They aren't what this music is about. It's about ballads that make you think and make you cry and make you cross. It's about someone being up on stage one minute, and playing in the bar to an audience of none the next, presumably because he likes it. It's about amateurs who care about which work-song was sung on which ship when and strumming away to silly ballads about something they read in the newspapers.