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.

Eurovision 2010 live - part 2

Thank you to 'The Voyeurist', who commented upon my first post about Eurovision 2010 in which I didn't make it clear that what I posted were only some of my live musings and, specifically, I did not include the entry from Serbia.  That said here are most of the rest of those notes that I did take and it does include a brief note on the Serbian entry... 

I simply didn't have the time to write everything I might have done just on a single listening and certainly not the fascinating lyric highlighted.  What I will say is the Balkan influence on much western European traditional music is centuries, perhaps even far more than a millennium, older than Eurovision. 

The entry from Moldova caught my ear too. Another entry that I commented on is that from Albania and that is not merely a comment on the fact that it was a good shot from a nation so recently integrated into Eurovision.  If I had to choose one song to plug from the whole competition then this would be it - what a wonderful fusion of apparently incompatible influences.  Expect this kind of thing anywhere, and everywhere, across Europe soon.

We (in the UK) complain about the Eastern European influence (in Eurovision terms) in recent years but, on the latest evidence, I'm coming to like some of it.  The problem is ours: we can do great music but when it comes to Eurovision we are always something like a decade behind.

You can find any number of similarly minded, and very successful, artists and acts in the UK at the moment but why would they want to risk their reputation by participating in Eurovision?

It is a sad state of affairs, as regards the UK, but it is no reflection on the the Eurovision Song Contest itself and this might seem to be a very curious place to start to explain why...

The album is ostensibly Celtic folk and this my example of it, Polydor 'SUPER 2383 301' of 1974 and thus on vinyl. Several tracks on it are taken from North American renditions of folk songs and two others are interpretations of Romanian folk tunes. The thing is that there isn't a huge musical gulf between any of them...

It also includes 'P stands for Paddy I Suppose', a track that I rather like and one that has also been covered much more recently.