Thursday
Maybe
it’s the subliminal advertising or maybe it’s more blatant than that, but as the
Family Mahone come to an end I feel the need to go for a drink. Any band that
has it’s own beer roadie to keep their glasses topped deserves
respect.
The Family Mahone,
‘all the way from Chester just to entertain you’, in which case where were the
Welsh drinking songs J, were a great opening act and set a high
standard by which the rest would be judged.
During the set I’d had problems with my camera, there
were problems with focus and light levels.(I know what you’re thinking, but I’d
barely touched a drop at that stage.) I’d dropped the camera a couple of weeks
previously and was thinking that it was something pretty serious. Visions of
finding a Photoshop in town and maybe parting with some serious
readies.
Luckily one of the FATEA crew, John, teaches photography
so I asked him to give the camera a quick once over. However it was his
daughter, Alice, owner of a similar model, that saw the problem. “You’ve knocked
the switch from auto to manual.” The damned thing had been expecting me to do
the adjustments for lights and distance DOH!
Problem quickly and embarrassingly simply fixed, it was time to go back
in ready to catch the next band on, The
Bills.
Originally the Bill Hilly Band, a name change has seen their perception change from being something of a novelty act into something slightly more together. In reality there’s no change, they always were slightly more together, it’s just the perception, a rose by any other name etc.
Soundwise the band are something of influence whores,
Celtic, English, Latin, Romany all have their parts in one or more of the bands
songs, though there is a definite bias towards the Celtic influence, as well as
songs you can dance to.
The
band have plenty of movement on stage and convey that energy to the audience,
particularly those in the front few rows, most still on a partial high from that
which had gone before.
There
may not have been much in the way of drinking songs, but there was a wide range
of material that covered a plethora of topics, including that fine folk
tradition, the murder ballad.
This
one was less a ballad more an uptempo telling of the murder of the man that had
designed the band’s hometown. It was the wife’s young lover what done it. Love,
sex and death within one song, it doesn’t get much better than
that.
It
was a good set, definitely enjoyed it, but as it was coming to an end, it
occurred to me, The Bills would also be playing tomorrow, I managed to miss
Bryony Lemon’s new band Dealan over in the Club Tent and they were only playing
once. Sorry.
Unusually for me on the Thursday, the Club Tent was going
to be in for a torid time. The Low Country had lost out to The Family Mahone,
Dealan had lost out to me cocking up, there was no way I was going to miss out
on Martha Wainwright so that meant I’d let Sleeping Dogz lie. Which basically
left Les Chauffeurs A Pieds, who would have been a tight run across site and I
wanted to see Hayseed Dixie perform in a more intimate venue than their Stage 1
performance later in the festival would
allow.
For
the first time since it’s inception, Thursday night in the Club Tent wouldn’t
get a look in.
I
managed to meet up with an old friend between The Bills and Martha Wainwright
and have a quick chat before heading towards the pit to get the photos done. For
some reason Martha was only playing the one set at the festival. The photo pit,
that had been sparsely populated for the first two bands was suddenly packed to
the gills.