Saturday
Saturday starts off the same way as Friday, a shower and a trip to the
Unicorn for breakfast. A full English polished off, there's time to finish the
Friday write up before heading off to the site.
It's still earlyish and I
find myself going against the flow of slightly hungover festivalers going the
other way.
First objective of the day is the Club Tent and Karine Powart's singing
workshop. There's a queue of peolple waiting to sign up for a festival
session.
Some of them have been queueing since the ungodly, for a festival,
hour of eight o'clock in the morning.
Glancing at the board I notice that
Martha Wainwright played a fifteen minute slot last night and I'd managed to
miss it, damn! To make matters worse someone who heard me cursing claimed it was
his set of the festival so far.
Karine's workshop starts off with a workout
to shake the cobwebs out of the system and loosen the vocal chords. Even so
there's something quite surreal about watching one hundred people doing front
crawl without the aid of a swimming pool.
Ironically a number of the FATEA
crew are at the swimming pool, shaking off the rigours of last
night.
Exercises over it was time to get those vocal chords working. The
first couple of songs are simple rounds. The first is in English, the second
Scots, in preperation for more a more complicated tunes later on.
It's a
different start to the day and one I'm sure was rewarding for those taking
part.
Time for the first drink of the day, a banana milkshake this time.
Being a music journo isn't all about hard drink, hard drugs and hard
women.(Sigh)
The festival proper hasn't started yet, the media team are
starting to get the day sorted, but have still managed to find time to set up
the dartboard.
A couple of games of 301 are had and the press darts
tournament is a distinctly worrying possibilty.
It's midday, the weather can
best be described as overcast and sultry. What we really need to get the mood
just right is a bit of old timey bluegrass. Fortunately that's just what we got
in the shape of Old Crow Medicine Show(OCMS)
OCMS were the surprise hit of
last year, a surprise because they weren't booked, came along as guests of
Gillian Welch and circumstances conspired to give them a couple of
slots.
This year they were booked in their own right and were the perfect
start to the day. Their sound may be based on bluegrass, but the songs are more
drugs and pimps than Deliverance.
There's plenty of young women down the
front to catch this visually as well as audibly pleasing band.
There was time
to work up a sweat and then let it chill when they hit the slower numbers. OCMS
show were a band in the right place last year. The same was true of this
year.