Frome 2014 - this is the town in which I live.

Wherever my focus of new music listening may currently lie - and actually it is still in the US - this coming weekend is going to focus on those events playing out in my home town of Frome, Somerset, UK.
   
It is raining at the moment but the forecast isn't bad; so let's see how things turn out. I'm planning to take my camera and simply see what comes my way and how it all pans out. It is the start of the festival season, after all, and where better to start than at home? It is also Frome Festival 2014 between 4 and 11 July. There is a great deal more to music and performance arts in Somerset than the admittedly rather famous Glastonbury Festival, not least during the other 362 days of the year, and there will be little, if any, mention of mud.

I don't intend to lose sleep prefiguring the outcome but I least I know the layout, the pitfalls, and the short-cuts. On the other hand, should anyone try to tempt me into opinion on music in 2014 then I've been thinking about that too. It is halfway through so, based on simple logic alone, I should have heard half of my favourites of the year.
It is akin to saying that Frome is a small/medium-sized country market town (pop. ~25,000) where nothing much happens and it probably never has. It doesn't work quite like that.    

Carnival-style. Frome Street Bandits. Live in the audience. This afternoon.

From my point of view at least it was going to be difficult to imagine any other artist to be the highlight of the music stage. It is a running joke that because she hails from Bristol... this however is the third time that I have seen Daisy Chapman play live in Frome. And then the sun came out, at last.

It is fair to say that she was likely to be the highlight of the evening.

She played some, at least to me, new songs. I wonder if a follow up to 'Shameless Winter' is in the works?

Between the two aforementioned acts came the Celtic folk of Frome based eight-piece Milk Street. I had never seen them all playing live together before and (all my own fault) was actually in a poor position to capture all of them in the same picture.

An up-beat selection was just what was required at this point in the proceedings. They served it up admirably.