Friday

Between sets, I take the opportunity to see how the ceilidh's going. The steps are getting more complicated, but all appears to be going well.
There's a few problems before The Waterboys Acoustic come on, but some frantic negotiation resolves them quickly and the crowd aren't even aware. I won't go into detail, suffice to say if you play the Charles Wells Cambridge Folk Festival, you might just suspect there might be a banner or two on stage advertising the fact.
That said from the moment you could sense this was going to be good. Partly because you could see Steve Wickham behind Mike Scott. The sound was a lot more "Whole Of The Moon" than "Fisherman's Blues".
Scott's voice is one of the most recognisable in music, fronting his older sound it was like being he had found home again. Kate Bush once said 'forgive me my mistakes'. The crowd certainly forgave Mike his.
This was more than simple nostalgia. The sound is different, it's developed, sometimes you need to draw on the past to march into the future. By accident or design, they delivered exactly the set the crowd had wanted and the crowd lapped it up and were left wanting more.
It's decision time again Horace X, a Cambridge based folk/dance fusion band or Taraf De Hadouks an artificially created Romany weddings and funerals band. It's not an entirely fair description. Maybe a better way of describing them would be, a supergroup of Gypsies from in and around Clejani.
Horace X kicked of the festival last year, went down well and were rewarded with a slot in the festival proper this year. Whilst there not entirely my cup of tea, they are really colourful and a contrast to pretty much every other act playing the festival this year.
This year they're playing their full UV set. The lighting and their colourful costumes creating an amazing visual effect.
I stay for the first couple of numbers before deciding to check out Taraf De Hadouks. Part way between sets, roughly next to festival hq, there's a really weird fusion of sound, traditional gypsy music set to a drum and bass back beat. I stop for a few minutes to listen to the bizarre cacophony that's swirling around my ears before moving into the Gypsy zone.
Looking at the crowd there's a number of people dancing, that if they didn't buy their tickets purely for Taraf De Hadouks, certainly had them high on their list of bands to see.
Taraf De Hadouks played one of the longest sets of the festival so far. There was incredible instrumentation throughout and a really good energy about them.
Initially I really enjoyed what was going on. The music was fresh and vital. It had been a good while since I listened to this particular type of sound and I couldn't help but tap my feet.
Unfortunately it didn't stay that way. I pretty soon discovered that I had a threshold for this particular genre. I don't think it was just me. A gradule drift away from the stage was gathering momentum.
There was a plus point to this. It gave the people that knew how to dance to this the space to do it properly. For a short while my interest was renewed, but it didn't last long.
I think that it's probably because I don't know enough about the genre to pick out the nuances, but in the space of forty minutes I had gone from, this is really good, through this is a bit familiar to quite frankly I've had enough.
Mercifully it stopped and there was still enough time to get to the extended opening hours bar to grab a pint before heading back to base camp.