Saturday

I really enjoyed this set and resolved to catch them again later at the more intimate Club Tent.
Rory McLeod was up next who was bringing the troubadour tradition back to Mainstage 1. He's a great writer of songs about family and experience. He's well travelled and he draws on so much from so many different peoples and styles.
This is what songwriting is about, stories put to music and tales to be told. You could imagine Rory being given the role of Chaucher in 'A Knight's Tale'. Actually if Chaucher was a singer songwriter he would be Rory McLeod.
During his set another shower drifts across the site, but by the time the stage has been reset for The Oysterband the rain's gone away. I know that I can catch a full set tomorrow so for the time being I content myself with the first fifteen minutes of their set. Virtually as soon as the first chord was struck you just knew they were back.
Even before I scooted off to get to the Radio 2 stage, The Oysters had people on their feet dancing. The Oysterband have played everything from ceilidh to roots rock at Cambridge the consistent factor has been quality and today was no exception.
The reason I had to leave them today was because Give Way were playing on the Radio 2 Stage. Give Way are four sisters between the ages of thirteen and sixteen who won the Young Tradition Award this year.
Unusually for the winners of the Young Tradition, Give Way, came into the traditioal music scene through school rather than a family background. It shows in their approach, there is something refreshingly different about the way they put their sound together. They seem to enjoy it because it's a whole new path of discovery for them.
The set starts slightly tentatively, but the girls are pretty soon in their stride and the audience are right behind them. The are a great collection of tunes that are spread across a range of tempos.
I get a tap on the shoulder the shoulder and the guy says 'these are great do you know if you've got an album'. Unfortunately they don't, but the person asking the question just happened to be Joe Cocker.
A sign of how an artist is going is the direction of travel of the people during the set. For Give Way all the traffic was inward and it wasn't even raining. The future of traditional would appear to be in safe hands.
I'm interviewing the band afterwards so unfortunately I'm going to have to give Eric Bibb's solo set a miss. The interview in the can, it's time to head across to the Club Tent to catch my second Be Good Tanyas set of the festival.
If anything it's better than the first. The venue seems better keyed into their low-level, torch country style. They also seem to be responding very well to being a couple of feet away from the audience.
All in all it seems to be a bit more relaxed and the girls seem to be keeping their eyes open a bit more. It was fun, I just hope the girls enjoyed it as much as I did.
From laid back torch it was back to Mainstage 1 and folk supergroup Blue Murder. To have the various members of the Waterson Carthy clan assembled in one band creates a big enough group, but adding Coope, Boyes and Simpson to the mix make it almost obscene.
So many great voices, so many different combinations, this was English folk music at it's best. Being perfectly honest there were a couple of combinations that didn't really work, but it was the exception that proved the rule.
The dynamics were superb, English folk has been eclipsed over the years, but the balance is being redressed. This showed that it's not just the younger generation that's driving it forward, the old guard stil has a lot to contribute.
As with everything the key is quality and there has been a lot of bad vocal tradition that has pulled it into the mire, today went a long way to redressing the balance.