Green Man :: 2016 :: Dyn Gwrydd - Part 2 - acts seen live before

Time to get on with the music that I went to see and hear. Where better to start than a band whose career playing festivals almost exactly matches in time that of going to them myself? The correlation goes further - from Latitude 2007 to Green Man 2016, via No Direction Home 2012 and others, it always rains when I see Sheffield's Slow Club play. They have come a long way since first I saw Charles and Rebecca on the 'BBC Introducing stage' at Latitude Festival back in 2008. It involved wooden chairs and empty bottles as percussion. I will have to go back in time and find some pictures of that...

"You look so colourful in your cagoules". Rebecca's comment was true Yorkshire wit.

This post, I've just decided, is going to cover artists and acts that I have seen live at a festival at least once before. This is, I think, the fifth time that I have seen Slow Club play a full set at a festival. That's not a record, in fact it is not even close.

This next band is something of a nightmare to categorise: alt/indie country-rock but (with the exception of a judicious cover in their set this time) all sung in Welsh. This was the only picture that I managed to take that included all six members of the band!

Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog, Walled Garden stage, late Sunday afternoon.

Rhos Botwnnog is a village in the Llŷn peninsular, North Wales from which the band hails. I guess you can translate cowbois yourself. This is only the second time I have seen the band live; the first was also at the ill-fated No Direction Home Festival in 2012.

Thursday aside when it was almost the only place anything was happening, my forays into the vast tented gloom of the Far Out stage were then limited to Sunday. Of all those only one falls into the category of artists that I have seen live before. That is this one and it was a tremendous set. I first saw him play the Tipi stage on the Thursday evening at End Of The Road Festival 2014 and I wrote about that here.

Ezra Furman, Far Out stage, Sunday evening.

All these artists have new releases in tow, which they wish to promote and of course that is just how it should be. That is also true of this next, a four-piece from California that I saw live at End Of The Road Festival 2013.  Rather than focus on the front line this time I took this for it is the rhythm section that keeps the whole show on the rails.  Warpaint was first support on the Mountain stage on Sunday evening, which Belle and Sebastian headlined.

Stella Mozgawa, Warpaint, Mountain stage, 21 August 2016.

End Of The Road 2014 - something old, something new

One thing that I have left unmentioned thus far is the 'limited programme' provided on Thursday evening. It was instituted a few years ago for the then small proportion of festival attendees that arrived on Thursday afternoon. All indications suggest that this fraction is rising year by year, probably exponentially.
This all took place on the Tipi stage and comprised four acts from 6:15pm. The last, and easily the pick of them, was Ezra Furman. He also played the Garden Stage Friday evening (which I did not see, but apparently excellent too.)
Here he is on the smaller stage on Thursday evening. The easiest way to categorize him is to say that I can't. I think that this might be key to his seemingly burgeoning appeal. He would have it that he has made greater inroads in the UK than in his native USA (originally from Illinois). It's rock albeit of a more-or-less pop persuasion, it is certainly camp (his band is The Boyfriends), it is clever and knowingly so, but surely we have seen all those things combined before?

That is probably true but if we took that approach more widely then we would have nothing left to listen to. NOTHING. AT. ALL. The majority of the tracks came from his 2013 LP 'Year Of No Returning'. The point is that it was everything it should be; unpredictable (not least the self-deprecating asides), sometimes challenging but above all it was hugely enjoyable. What's not to like?

In some ways the next artist tells, through his songs and his career, an equally unlikely story. From an icon of the UK folk-rock boom in the late 1960s to, more than four decades later, being held in the highest regard in the US as one of the totems of the Americana/roots explosion. Richard Thompson made his recording début as a founder member of Fairport Convention in 1967.

His latest LP 'Acoustic Classics' (2014) is less a greatest hits, though of course they are, but more an attempt to regain his own songs that in many cases are now better known by many people via the cover versions of others. He played this set on the Garden stage, Sunday evening solo and acoustic except for the finale for which he was joined by his daughter and son in law.

The next is an example of how live music plays out in other ways to that which is recorded. The LP 'Rain Plans', by Israel Nash, has been recommended to me more times than I am inclined to count yet still languished in the "saved for later" section of my on-line cart and I never committed to purchasing it. That situation was very conveniently resolved. Without any on-line dealings!

Israel Nash, Tipi stage, Friday evening, End Of The Road 2014.

When Futur Primitif appeared on the Garden stage on Sunday morning there were plenty of comments concerning his new, jacketed visage and that was quite understandable. 

I'm happy to say that he retains his maverick streak but only the early birds amongst us, and we were quite numerous, really got to see it (during the sound check). Any which way the songs are so good.

August and onward.

A one day festival (Behind The Castle) in June. A two day festival (Truck) in July. 
That was just the warm up. In two weeks time I shall be resident in Powys, Wales at Green Man Festival and it will be my first ever visit, which is exciting. Two weeks later comes my annual pilgrimage, since 2009 at least, to End Of The Road (EOTR). There are so many more... this weekend is the 50th Cambridge Folk Festival  and 21-5th August is the 50th Towersey Folk Festival. In an ideal world I would have quite happily gone to all of these and many more too. I have to say that one that has piqued my interest for a couple of years now, although it is in distant south Suffolk, is Maverick Festival. I could list many more that have caught my eye but seven links in the first paragraph is way more than enough. It is time to focus on those that I am going to and what I might wish from them.
It might be leavened with shorter posts on new music.

I'm thinking that this post is something I shall add to over the weekend and it will be thoughts about the acts that I want to see most at Green Man or EOTR and why. Reviews such as this certainly don't hurt. Ezra Furman is playing EOTR. Never seen him live nor heard his music that I am aware of.
I'll tell you one, from EOTR, that is right at the top of my list - Richard Thompson. I don't need to justify that.

In my eight years of festival attendance the changing balance is to be struck between artists that I have heard before and those new to me. As my recent posts concerning Truck 2014 may have made clear, my liking for seeing new artists, or ones that are merely new to me live or otherwise, remains undiminished. There is now a new category too - artists in new acts/guises. Maybe that is where, probably tomorrow, I shall start this discussion. I have two in particular in mind right now and, echoing the recent comments of Robin Seamer at Breaking More Waves, I have also been thinking about those end-of -year lists too. I rather suspect that the début albums by both will feature on mine.
Here is an observation that is just mine: in 2007 I started my end of year reviews with EPs and mini albums because that was easy. The weren't many and fewer still that I felt worthy of mention and I said then that I had felt it was a dying format. I suspect that in fact I had caught it just reviving from its death throes. It is true that much of this has to due with the ascendency of digital music but that is only part of the Lazarus story. Even in 2007 EPs were starting to appear on vinyl, 7", 10" and 12", and the story continues to grow to the present. This is a more recent, but you would not guess it, example of a single:

It was released physically only on cassette tape.

I could tell you about more worthwhile EPs from the first six months of 2014 than from 2007-9 in total. I don't think, for one moment, that this is simply because I am better informed, although I am. It is much more significant than that.

What this post does lack is photographs but that is an interesting demonstration of a cascade of consequence.
When I started to blog a problem soon became apparent - I needed more original stuff to write about. The obvious answer to that was to go to festivals. Festivals are about live music, which is an intrinsically visual medium too, so I needed pictures of what I saw and heard.