Around With Alice
Sunday
However gutted I am that the cost of my good night’s sleep was that I missed out on both Kate Rusby and The Blind Boys Of Alabama (I’m sorry! Letting the side down or what?!), while the rest of the festival lurched around the site, bleary-eyed, I felt fantastic on Sunday morning. Rather than queuing for the showers, I developed a cunning strategy for washing my hair, involving a camping-stove, a bottle of shampoo, lots of bottles of clean water, a large mug and plastic bowls. Feeling refreshed, I had my regular vegetarian fry-up at Sainsburys and headed straight to the site, Hamish stumbling sleeping behind me.
First-stop was
a very important engagement for me for I was lucky enough to be invited to sit
in on an interview that Neil was doing with The Duhks fiddler, Tania Elizabeth,
and percussionist, Scott Senior. Having been a part of a group of friends in my
town who set up a make-shift record label for a year or so to help support our
friends bands, I was fascinated to find that Tania had run a recording company
at only 15 years old. I suppose I can hardly call myself an interviewer as I was
so bowled over to actually be sat in a real interview that my mouth pretty much
refused to work, but to have such an insight into the real behind-the-scenes
workings of the media teams was certainly one of the highlights of the weekend
for me. Especially having witnessed (part of, at least) their mind-boggling
Radio 2 stage set the afternoon before, I was really really chuffed to be able
to witness the interview.
I rushed back to where my family and friendswere ‘camped-out’ with their blankets near the front of Stage 1, grabbed Hamish and Holly by the arms and dragged them to the front barrier for The Duhks main-stage set. With my hands free (although my well-loved camera was still kept protectively around my neck), the three of us got down to some real movin’ an’ shakin’. Every year I walk away from Cambridge with a new favourite band or musician. One year it was Suzanne Vega, last year it was Gillian Welch (“pure perfection, absolutely sublime”, said my dad, which is the best description I have ever found for her). This year it was The Duhks. Enough said!
Following The
Duhks’ performance, absolutely elated, we rose once again to our feet to eagerly
welcome the next performer, Mary Gauthier. Having managed to survive the entire
weekend without either a watch or a programme, I had very little idea what to
expect from the singer-song-writer, but I have to say that she, quite literally,
had the audience in tears. With such a dark history behind her, there was
something very poignant about a figure like that not only wow-ing the folk
veterans with her technical song-writing abilities, with moving poetic lyrics,
but also bearing her soul to the world. We sprinted to the CD stall the second
her set had finished to buy her album, and queued up to get it signed. She was
one of the loveliest people I have ever been lucky enough to meet at the MOJO
signing tent, obviously utterly delighted that so many people had queued up to
congratulate her on her performance, all clutching their newly bought copies of
her album (the queue for her signing reached out almost all the way to the end
of the line of stalls). “Could you sign this for my mum, please, you made her
cry!”, I said as I handed over her CD to her. “That’s my job!” she said,
laughing.
After queuing for so long, we decided it would be a brilliant idea to queue up yet again for The Duhks signing. What can I say? We’re British - we like to queue!. I held up the entire queue when the guitarist thought my name was Alex, not Alice, and had to artistically change it, with people behind me joking “Alice doesn’t live here anymore!” (never heard THAT one before!) My brother, Tom, emerged from the signing tent “red as a watermelon”, as Hamish put it, because the fiddler drew a little heart next to his name, causing us to spend the next half an hour doubled-up laughing, teasing him with ‘fiddler’ puns (“Tom loves a good fiddle!”, “Don’t fiddle with his emotions like that!”, “Tom likes jigging with fiddlers!” etc…) I could go on.