Frome Blues Festival 2013

Well that's North Dorset Folk Festival 2013 reviewed but I'm quite sure that you haven't heard the last of it. 

There is no rest for the wicked and so the following day it was all change. I was closer to home, less then a fifteen minute walk, at Frome Blues Festival 2013. I have to say I wondered how it, and the change of genre, would fare with me in comparison to the previous day. My stamina was one thing I was pretty confident about - this was no test like End of The Road Festival in that respect!
The good news is, that at least from my point of view, it was all good and I have now had ten days to think about it. What I haven't done much of is working through the pictures that I took that day...
It was opened byAlbany Down that I first experienced live saw live at Rook Lane Arts in Frome earlier in the year as support for Chantel McGregor; a few months after she had played Frome Blues Festival 2012 as first support.

Here is my first take on Albany Down at Frome Blues Festival 2013 and, no doubt about it, they were very impressive.

That isn't the quite the term that I would have chosen six months ago.

  

I couldn't have taken this then either but it was, in all probability, not there to be taken.
  

To be quite honest Ron Sayer Jr. had no intent to be taken lightly, and with some reason, if not always exactly perhaps the one that he had in mind. 

He was good but his band kept him on tip-toes all the time and that is well worth seeing.

Innes Sibun was new to me but blues-rock of some impact. Indeed I thought in the moment that it might even become the highlight of the day but, while that ultimately was not to be so, it says a great deal about Frome Blues Festival. 

Innes Sibun on lead guitar.

With album 'Lost In The Wilderness' to trial. It is released 18 November 2013 in the UK.

  

Jo Harman and Company became the first and only act to play both editions of Frome Blues Festival. Last year I noted that I was impressed and this year was a step change.

Here, during an instrumental interlude, is the eponymous vocalist with a quite different take on blues-rock. Jo Harman is one-to-watch in 2014, there is no doubt about that.
First support was Nimmo Brothers and kicked some ass... as well as it falling to them by fâte to announce the sad demise of of Lou Reed. Their response was anything but a sombre set but then again I don't think that is what he would have wanted. As live performances go this could truly be described as visceral.
  

This was at the start of the set and shows all of the band. While clearly committed it gave little hint of the intensity that was to follow. Not least the brothers' dual lead guitar work and certainly not that it would become quite as complicated as this. I took this next picture on a hope and a prayer, whilst simultaneously trying to believe in that which I was watching.

It would be a good trick if...    and they certainly could.

In some ways this repeated last year's festival when the first support act, Chantel McGregor, pitched the headline act into what proved to be an impossible situation. The Climax Blues band headlined this year, and it was excellent too. It was made quite clear however that it was fully aware of what it had to follow. On any other occasion either could have been the highlight of a marvellous day for the pleasingly large audience. It just so happened that Frome Blues Festival came with more than one highlight... and I for one can't help but look forward to the next edition.
Here are a few pictures of Climax Blues Band and, I have to say, I must start with their astonishing saxophonist.

Some slide guitar to die for...

...and a lead singer for whom the epithet 'craggy' is something of an understatement.  

What a wonderful day that was. See you next year!

Live in Frome - Chantel McGregor

It is now much tidier and no longer weed-overgrown as it appears in this picture, which is obviously a good thing, but would you have suspected that it is as well as a Grade 1 listed building and after 251 years in use as a non-conformist chapel, and subsequently the better part of fifty years quietly decaying, now an arts venue, including live music whilst also home to a thriving architectural practice?

It is a bit much to ask, I know, but it is true. Maybe it was meant to be slightly forbidding.

Whether that is true I can't say but it is still formidable, not least because it is a very intimate venue indeed. There are no corners in which to hide and that applies as much to the audience as to the artists. I still wonder, however what the founders and subscribers for the building, when Frome was a town very rich indeed on the wool trade, would make of it all now. I'd like to think, as in their time they were forward-looking and sometimes almost to the point of revolution, they could see the positive side of it all. It might have been a challenge...

Rock four-piece Albany Down kicked things off with a solid set only marginally disrupted by some issues with the lead vocalist's mike and associated lead that were soon sorted out. Two albums, 'South of The City' and 'Not Over Yet' notwithstanding, these things can happen to anyone at any time and so here is Albany Down, live at Rook Lane Chapel Frome.

A great deal of stuff on one of the shallowest stages, which is why the monitors are actually placed on chairs in front of the stage and barely out of the way of the legs of those in the front row of the audience. Sometimes the publicity says "intimate gig" and this was that and then some.  There were a number of memorable tracks, all their own, and some fine guitar moments too.

On another day they could have been headlining and almost everyone, myself included, would have gone home happy but it was not to be one of those days.
This is where I started to wonder really what those wealthy subscribers, who paid for the building of this edifice over three centuries ago, might be thinking.
Not only is it being used for wicked enjoyment. This happened: Chantel McGregor...

"Tis a Wednesday evening; you should be a-busy weaving."

It only got better after that: this is after all an artist who only the previous day (and the first day of this tour) had not only been nominated in the short-list for 'Best Female Vocalist' by The British Blues Awards 2013 (an award she won in 2012) but also in the short-list for 'Best Guitarist' and the first time a female artist has ever been nominated in the category.

You might even have got the impression that she was thoroughly enjoying herself and, with music and the faultless backing of Richard Ritchie (bass) and Keith McPartlin (percussion), who can blame her.

Towards the middle of the set she played and sang three songs, all cover versions, solo:

• Rhiannon ( Stevie Nicks)
• I Can't Make You Love Me (Bonnie Raitt)
• Nothing Else Matters (Metallica)

That is not to say that the many tracks from the album 'Like No Other' were not equally noteworthy, the album opener 'Fabulous' particularly so, or indeed the new track 'Disco Lover Suicide', for they were. I think, however, that the final straw for the luminaries behind the founding of Rook Lane Chapel came with the sudden revelation. They had been changing the playlist throughout and she had to tell her band-mates, there and then, that the penultimate track of the main set would be a cover and here they are playing it:

Jimi Hendrix' 'Voodoo Child'.