Around With Alice
Thursday
When I started writing a post-festival article for the FATEA Cambridge website, the initial idea I believe was to offer an insight into a teenage experience of the folk festival. In the years since, however, I have gradually been allowed to explore further into the backstage area of the site, and so finally this year I actually found myself writing not from an average teenager’s perspective of the festival, but from the perspective of an average teenager who finds herself at album launches, sitting in on interviews, meeting band-members and standing in the photographer’s pit with a camera in my hand. Surreal situations to find yourself in, let me tell you, but quite simply making for the best Cambridge Folk Festival I have ever experienced in all my 5-year history with it - with hopefully many more years to come.
Usually I start my annual article by complaining about what
a hideous hour my dad drags the entire family out of bed at, but thankfully this
year we persuaded him otherwise. I woke at 7.30am, shocked to find myself still
in my own bed on the Thursday morning of the festival. Usually at that time we
are sat in some service station, forcing coffee down our throats and my mother
is panicking because she’s sure she’s forgotten the tent pegs. Incredibly, and I
never thought I’d say this, despite an emergency pit-stop at Oswald Bailey’s to
buy an extra inflatable mattress (we camp in style), the journey to Cambridge
Folk Festival 2005 was a relaxed one, with a travelling soundtrack of Django
Reinhart and Leftfield. Even setting up our tents at Coldham’s Common was reasonably pain-free, whilst normally it descends into
screaming warfare between tent-peggers and tent-pole-holders.
This year, besides my parents and brother, we were accompanied by my friend Hamish, my friend Holly and her family, as well as various other family friends who regularly make the trip to the festival. Clutching beers, apples and our waterproofs, since the weatherman cunningly fooled us into packing the unnecessary wet-weather essentials before we left, we caught the bus to the main site and congregated with our fellow Poole comrades. From a distance we managed to catch the end of The Family Mahone, fittingly described in the programme as “singing drinking songs”, rousing the Cambridge beer-drinkers into a swaying mob of dancers - perhaps the perfect opening band to the festival. Being the typical teenage girl that I am, I quickly ticked off my initial priority from my to-do list by having a shopping rampage through the stalls. The usual folk festival purchases were available, of course; a vast selection of bodhrams, pipes, guitars and accordions, every Woody Guthrie CD ever made, 100% wool jumpers plastered with giant daisy designs, hand-made paper notebooks, intricate silver rings… I opted for raiding the bargain bin on the CD stall and came away with far too many CDs than I should have done.
Having witnessed the spectacle of her older brother in
stilettos and wings with a sash reading “MISS POOLE” prancing around the stage
of the Poole Lighthouse, my second priority of the evening was to catch Martha
Wainwright’s set at 8pm. Holly, Hamish and I attempted to fight our way to the
front, but it would seem every other person on the site had the same idea in
mind, so we were forced to settle for standing half way inside the Radio 2
stage. Personally, I thought her set was stunning, however by the 4th song she
had already played every song of hers that I knew, and I found that once you’ve
gotten over how impressive her voice is, you really need to know her songs for
her to hold your absolute rapt attention, although she did a hauntingly
beautiful cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Tower Of Song’. I was actually quite annoyed
to find other people in the audience getting a bit bored of her by the end, and
a girl behind me muttered loudly to her companion, “I’m going to have a t-shirt
made that says ‘I survived Martha Wainwright and all I got was this lousy
T-shirt’”. No, I didn’t turn round and tell her to shut up and listen, but I
felt like it. I have every intention of buying Martha’s album still, because if I
ever get a chance to see her live again I think to know the songs would
lift her performance to another level.
By this point, I didn’t really have the energy to bound around to Hayseed Dixie, after a long day of travelling and tent-pitching. My two side-kicks, Holly and Hamish, and myself, bought some amazing vegetable stir-fry and found a quiet corner to chill out and laugh every time we recognised, in the distance, Hayseed Dixie playing Green Day to a crowd of folk-fanatics who were from the sound of it loving every second. In high-spirits, we bid Holly good-night and Hamish and I wandered back to Coldham’s Common by foot, if only to be nosy and play a game of rate-the-interior-design as we walked back in the dark through suburban roads with lit-up living rooms.