Thoughts on 2016 festivals...

The snowdrops are out and therefore spring is only a month, or maybe two, away!
It is that time of year once again - time to think about festivals this coming summer. That is not to say that the weather will play nice but what's not to like?

Three pictures from Green Man Festival 2015 and not a programme artist performing!

I've pretty much finalised my festival-going ideas for 2016 but confirmation of the detail remains, as does the vast majority of the artists appearing at all of them. That is something I can take on trust; the ambience is also an important consideration too.
One thing that is already decided is that, despite having a wonderful time at Cambridge Folk Festival 2015, I shall not be returning in 2016.

Cambridge Folk Festival 2015 - Part 4 - all sorts of folk

This post doesn't have a specific theme, in part simply because I can't think of one, other than to add how good it all was in its variety. There is however a mild sense of urgency I suppose: I was at Cambridge a fortnight ago and I am still processing that; this time next week I shall be in Wales and about half way through experiencing Green Man 2015.

It is right, particularly in these politically heightened times, to start with a legend. She played the first ever Cambridge Folk Festival in 1965 (the year that I was born, I was about seven weeks old then). Here she is performing solo again fifty years to the day later. And also being nothing if not political...

Peggy Seeger, Stage 2, Friday evening.

She was an artist that I had never seen live before. The next two I have, the former more recently than the latter. The word iconic is possibly over-used but this is one time that I feel it is totally justified.

Show of Hands - Stage 1 - early Saturday afternoon.

As they often are, Steve Knightley and Phil Beer were accompanied by Miranda Sykes on double bass for a romp through their observations on the eccentricities of England and Englishness.
In some ways this artist does that too, but perhaps less stridently. It is over three years, and therefore far too long, since I have seen her play live. Three years in which she has produced so much music too.

Bella Hardy - Stage 1 - early Sunday afternoon.

The emphasis is less on her amazing fiddle playing, and when she does it is often finger-picked, because it really doesn't have to be. She chose to play songs from her latest LP 'With The Dawn'. She played a new song too - she is nothing if not prolific, even excluding collaborations. It does however appear that the forthcoming, second Carthy Farrell Hardy Young LP and the follow-up to Laylam (2013), will be without Bella Hardy. On the other hand, not all news is bad; I believe that Jackie Oates is to take her place. To be honest this is about as amazing as discovering that a square can have five corners, despite all you had been taught.
I shall end this with an Old Etonian, but not one that turned out quite like the current Mayor of London, or indeed the current Prime Minister.
After a degree at LSE (History) he was with punk band Million Dead for a few years. When that dissolved, rather than a career in merchant banking, he took the acoustic route to fame, if not so much fortune. We can be very thankful for that.

Frank Turner - Stage 1 - Friday evening.

This, of course, included songs from his newly released album 'Positive Songs for Negative People'. He had us round his little finger, but he was very nice about it.

Cambridge Folk Festival 2015 - Part 3 - down at The Den (with an exception)

You might have spotted that my previous post consisted entirely of acts that played the main stage and that this is uncharacteristic. You are right --- this therefore is almost all about The Den, the smallest of the four stages. It is situated in the Cherry Hinton camp site that is adjacent to the Arena and it is Indian-themed, sort of. It is also very red and translucent, which makes photography something of a challenge. I'm not making excuses here, it is for you to judge how I coped with that but it was certainly an issue; an interesting one, however. The music, even if the artists were lesser known, was uniformly awesome.
Here are a few of my highlights; I missed several acts that I would like to have seen, because of clashes, but that is only to be expected.
This first one was someone that I first thought was totally unknown to me. When he started playing I realised that this was not so - simply that I didn't know or had somehow forgotten his name.

Jake Isaac - remember him. I will now. 

His 2014 War Child EP might be a good place to start.

The advertised acts on Saturday evening (there are open slots thereafter) were rounded out by Hampshire-based eight-piece Threepenny Bit, which just about fitted on the stage. Here is just tree farthings (or a quarter of part of it), caught between playing their parts.

From one rowdy band to another...
I have also swapped days and stages, for this is now Sunday evening in The Club Tent.

From Canterbury, Kent  ---  CoCo and The Butterfields.

Finally, returning to The Den again, this is London artist Flo Morrissey (no relation of the other Morrissey, as she mentioned, and tinged with regret I think, whilst introducing a cover of one of his songs). Most of what she played was from her recent début album 'Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful'.

I have mentioned this LP before. Seen and heard live and close it is almost surreal.
Flo Morrissey also plays End Of The Road 2015.

Cambridge Folk Festival 2015 - Part 2 - The American connection

One thing that very much appealed to me, as the line-up was announced incrementally, is that Cambridge Folk Festival does not define its sense of 'folk music' too parochially. That was particularly noticeable in the choice of artists from North America. Here are five such that I saw perform full sets. They all played Stage 1 and each was wonderful in its own special way.

The Stray Birds, from Lancaster, PA, serve to show that the old-time art of singing around a single microphone stand is far from dead. That is with good reason and the latest LP is 'Best Medicine' (2014).

This next is something a little closer to country - but not the increasingly derided bro-country. Indeed, had I not been in Cambridge (she played on Saturday) I could have seen her play Frome Cheese & Grain the previous evening. It was billed as a warm-up for Cambridge, so here is the result of that.

Gretchen Peters in support of her latest LP 'Blackbirds' (2015).

Although well known, not least to me for her work with old-time, jug band-influenced compatriots Carolina Chocolate Drops, this is that first time that I have ever actually seen Rhiannon Giddens live.

She is touring in support of her début solo LP 'Tomorrow Is My Turn' (2015), which is interesting in that it contains none of her original compositions. It takes a soul, roots trip through a variety of covers and traditional material.

Another band that has been garnering attention here in the UK recently is Brooklyn-based three-piece The Lone Bellow.

This is on the back of the band's second LP 'Then Came The Morning' (2015). It is even more difficult to assign a genre, whatever that means, to this than to the foregoing but suffice it to say that it has been gathering plaudits in its home country too and it is not hard to understand why.

To me perhaps the biggest surprise from Stateside to be announced for Cambridge Folk Festival 2015 is the last of the five that I have chosen to mention. As one of US alt-country trio The Pistol Annies, along with Ashley Monroe and Miranda Lambert, Angaleena Presley was the last to release a solo album by a country mile.

Some things are worth waiting for. 'American Middle Class' was most definitely one of them. It was a late entry into my list of Best Albums of 2014 and this set, had I had any doubt at the time, just proved to me why it was included there.

In case you are wondering about the letters on the fret of her guitar, rather obscured by the microphone stand, it is 'HOLLER' - she was 'Holler Annie' in the Pistol Annies. Miranda Lambert was 'Lonestar Annie' and Ashley Monroe 'Hippy Annie'.

Cambridge Folk Festival 2015 - Part 1 - Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker

I have to start somewhere with what turned out to be a very memorable long weekend. It was my first visit to this long-running festival and the first time that I have visited Cambridge that has been attended by good weather.
I haven't really decided how to group all the various highlights and so having mentioned Orkney five-piece Fara, who opened proceedings on the stages on Thursday evening, I thought I'd go with this, also from Stage 2 on Thursday evening.
It is a couple of years since I have seen Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker live and that was at The Bell in Bath. Nominated for the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards 'Best Duo' in 2014, they lost out to Phillip Henry and Hannah Martin.
They triumphed at the same, in the same category, in 2015 and here they are.

Ben Walker and his guitar. Only a few I have seen live play guitar in such a mystifying way.

Josienne Clarke on vocals.

We learnt a couple of other things too; Ben has a lovely singing voice but refuses to use it in public performance, and that the secret to being an award-winning duo is to have more than two members. In the picture above is Jo Silverston on 'cello and out of shot to the right Anna Jenkins on viola (both formerly members of Emily Barker and The Red Clay Halo).

Josienne played guitar as well as confessing to a miserabilist song-writing tendency.

Wonderful.

2015 Festivals - Cambridge Folk Festival

I probably mentioned that this is my "newbie" for 2015 - it is in fact the 51st year that Cambridge Folk Festival has been held, making it one of the world's longest continuously operating music festivals.  It took a certain recommendation, from one who is a pro, to persuade me to take the plunge however.  For me however it will be all new and I'm very much looking forward to it. I have two 'warm-up' festivals before it - Behind The Castle Festival and Truck Festival so come the weekend that spans the end of July and the start of August I should be well into the festival mentality. Now for some thoughts... one of which is that starting posts is often the hardest part. In a way this reminds me of the thing I most hated in school lessons - how to start a story. Another thing I disliked was revision - re-named research, in this case about the artists already announced for Cambridge Folk Festival, that seems way better.
I always liked making and keeping lists. I still do and so not long ago I was making a list of acts or artists that I would most like to see this summer. Pretty much at the top of it was this artist; about a week ago she was announced for Cambridge 2015.

I have been a big fan of Carolina Chocolate Drops since back when, but have never seen them play live. There will be clashes a-plenty, I can see that already, but she will be on my list of things to see.

Beyond that the question is simply where to start and only then beyond the astonishing trinity of Peggy Seeger, Joan Baez and Joan Armatrading. I have seen none of them live before.

The prolific Bella Hardy, whom I saw live at Frome Festival 2012, releases her latest album 'With The Dawn' this coming Monday and another that I would really like to catch live again. Cambridge Folk Festival is a world away from the Westway Cinema, Frome, although I mean no discredit to either venue.

This LP is almost entirely her own original songs rather than interpretations of traditional material.

If you think that that is an odd shift of emphasis then here is 'The Herring Girl', a Bella hardy original from the 2011 album 'Songs Lost & Stolen'.

Beyond that... well there is just so much I would like to see. I have seen The Unthanks four times before but that is not to say that I wouldn't wish to see them once again, not least because it has been a couple of years now and, never ones to rest on the laurels of past successes, they bring new album 'Mount The Air' into the equation. To state the obvious that isn't even the half of it. I can see The Willows at Behind The Castle but likely as not I will want to see them again less than two months later. The one certainty is that I won't be able, however determined I might be, to see everything that I want to see. That however is the mark of a really good festival, without the shadow of a doubt.
That decision to keep listening and beat the tiredness any way you can; I have caught forty winks somewhere or other in the arena between bands on many an occasion before. I don't see any reason to stop now.

Folk, Roots, Americana - whatever you want to label it.

It seems that my music theme for 2015 is to be set to folk/roots/Americana in all its many varied guises. I should probably mention here that the "new to me" festival for this summer is in fact one of the longest running of the kind - Cambridge Folk Festival. Conjured up in the autumn of 1964 it made its first appearance in the summer of 1965. I've had it in mind as one to try for a while now and this coincidence seemed to be the perfect excuse. I have my ticket.
I don't know if this is generally true or not but I think that my liking of such genres may be down to the music I was exposed to as a child. In particular, and I was reminded of this just yesterday evening, live music.

I saw Leveret at Rook Lane Arts, Frome yesterday evening and I'm happy to say that the event was very well attended. It was lengthy set that consisted of tunes (not songs) mostly traditional but a scattering of new compositions in the style. It served to remind me that despite a very rudimentary knowledge of music theory I can spot a slip-jig when I hear one.
More interesting was the commentary by the trio about something I had never considered. Many of the traditional tunes, and there are thousands of them, are now known only from manuscripts and some dating from the mid 17th Century. For the most part all they contain is the basic melody. To make the tune truly fly again the harmony, ornamentation and speed is all pretty much a case of reverse engineering. That, needless to say, takes a great deal of time, patience and skill.
It was an issue that had never really occurred to me before if I am honest.
The trio comprises Andy Cutting (diatonic button accordion, also known in some countries as melodeon), Rob Harbron (English concertina) and Sam Sweeney (fiddle) and the set was astonishing. I do wonder if had I been new to such music this might actually have proven an overwhelmingly intense experience. It could have felt like a lecture, albeit light heartedly-given, in an esoteric subject.
I wasn't the youngest member of the audience, that's for sure, but I reckon that I was well below the median age. On the other hand I am older than all the members of the band.

My next post will likely serve to illustrate the obvious - such as night follows day. It also reminds me of something I was told at one of the first festivals I went to.
I guess I must have mentioned that I didn't know anything about the majority of artists. It all seemed too much to get my head around and therefore what I went to see play was something of a lottery - fortunately, as it turned out, one with damn fine odds...  What I was told was roughly this: keep listening, remembering and making notes and in time it will become second nature. I only remembered this last night and I can't remember if I was awake or dreaming but it was a real conversation in origin.
Seven or so years after the origin of this I have realised that this is in fact entirely true. In a sense that is why photography plays a part for me - it is a kind of note-taking. There are two strands. One is that I can now find new music that I like almost on a whim and especially that in categories that back then I would have been rather dubious about. I still dislike pigeon-holing music by genre but had you suggested alt-country to me back then I would have probably thought you were trying to lead me on a wild goose chase. The second is that now the music quite often finds me instead. This year I am for the first time attempting to listen to music by many of the festival artists in advance. I know lots of people that do this but, until now, it has just seemed like a whole lot of effort and what is more I really like the surprise factor of festivals.
I know that I won't be able to do that for all acts in advance, so I won't really spoil that aspect for myself. If I were in danger of doing that at least the reason is simple - I'm hoping that it will allow more informed choices about which acts to see when there are the inevitable clashes.
If it does then the reality is rather prosaic.  It is to go to more festivals.