Summer Festivals 2012 - Deer Shed 3

I recently became aware of the fact there is that a whole lot about my experiences at festivals during the summer of 2012 that I have never mentioned. I think that I shall commence the remedy starting with Deer Shed Festival 3, Baldersby Park, North Yorkshire in mid-July. Before I start on the music the food stalls were amazing. When I find the card, I know it is somewhere just around where I am now, I shall name and fame the stall that sells the best pork pies in the world, ever: Sorry, Melton Mowbray.
I was listening to Simon Raymonde's show on amazingradio.co.uk this evening and it included a live session with, originally Southampton-based, four-piece Pale Seas and they are good even though they have yet to release their first album.

Pale Seas on the '(Far from the) Lake Stage' at Deer Shed Festival 2012.

Things beckon for them in 2013 much as happened a couple of years ago to this band that met at Cardiff University and then discovered that their planned career paths might need a slight rethink.

 Los Campesinos! on the 'Main Stage' at Deer Shed Festival 2012.

This was a band that I had long wanted to see live and one that certainly didn't disappoint. In fact nothing about this festival was a disappointment. It was also phenomenally family friendly so here is a picture or two of that aspect to finish this post.

This was free for kids to decorate before, once complete, it was floated in a pond.

In the main arena, Saturday afternoon.

Deer Shed Festival 3 - one week on

This is incredibly hard to write and not for the reasons that over the last five years and some I have become used to. I've even gotten somewhat inured to the fact that I write as a Briton (if never a great one) to a potential audience of millions. All that was put in to perspective yesterday - with the opening of the 30th Modern Olympiad in London. We, as host Nation, were never planning to upstage the sheer scale of the equivalent event at Beijing 2008, nor did we ever think that we might try to do so in budget, scale or pale imitation.
Britain just had to do it the only way it knows, which is what defines us - a wonderful mix of contradictory things that everyone but almost nobody - myself included - really properly understands and a certain penchant for comedy and self-deprecation.
It involved a lot of music, both old and new, but none of that from Deer Shed Festival 3 that I'm planning to mention now. It does however prompt me to mention that for every well known artist featured yesterday there are plenty more who aspire to gain our attention and are worthy of doing so. Aspiring athletes do not start at the Olympic Games, just as aspiring musicians do not headline Glastonbury, but they are there at the smaller festivals and local venues every week of every year. One thing that has made changes for them, and it was featured by the appearance of Sir Tim Berners-Lee at yesterday's event, is the internet. Without it I might not yet have even heard about these artists that I saw performing live at Deer Shed Festival 3: Think about what that really means.

As it always was, it only needs a little sunshine to get us in a party mood but a bar also helps too. Without the internet I would not be writing this and you, wherever you might be, would not be reading it. Yet, for all that, the reason that almost six-thousand of us were gathered there at all was for the entertainment - modern music,  live and strictly non-digital primarily, but also that most human of desires that is like-minded comradeship.

The sun first made an appearance on Friday evening when Belfast five-piece Cashier No. 9 were playing on the main stage.

I have seen this band live before, at Truck Festival 2011, and I was impressed then. I still am and they appear again at EOTR 2012, as part of the 15th anniversary of Bella Union Records on the Friday.

The very first act to play at Deer Shed Festival 3 was Leeds' Moody Gowns on the tented 'In The Dock Stage'. Not exactly the least abrasive of welcomes, perhaps...

...on the other hand a worthy welcome to the orthogonal world that is a good festival.

Deer Shed Festival 3 - The future is the young.

If the title of the post is true, and I believe it to be so, then for all the changes in the music industry things don't look too bad for the future of live, acoustic music. Gary Stewart and his supremely adaptable band on the (Far from the) Lake Stage, Saturday lunchtime.

  

The adults, in all probability, were enjoying it even more.