Thursday
The self appointed Cambridge Folk Festival weather forecasting team periodically stick their heads out of the festival meteorological office, namely the media caravan, in order to determine which of the two distinct atmospheric phenomenon would be the most likely to manifest itself today. Whilst straining their necks to face skywards, they in turn squint as they catch each tiny droplet of rain right between the eyes. It's generally a two horse race, sun or rain with equal quantities of both. The weather spoils nothing at Cambridge really, you get wet, you dry off. As long as everyone pulls together and affords a little courtesy, by gathering their blankets up close and literally doing away with high backed chairs, there's really no problem and everyone remains relatively dry and happy.
There were one or two firsts for me at this years' festival. Normally I manage to obtain a festival programme within an hour of arriving in Cherry Hinton, and with the help of a cold Guinness, I would also have the entire weekend planned out military style before the bar beckoned me along for pint number two. This year however, I didn't pick up a programme until day two and didn't touch a drop of the balck stuff until well into the evening after volunteering my services in the restricted areas on Thursday afternoon, helping to decorate the VIP bar with a gallery of large photographs featuring some of the familiar faces of previous festival artists, all beautifully photographed by several of the regular festival photographers. I was momentarily disorientated. I usually know my place, which is on t'other side of the barrier, where I eventually found myself for much of the next four days.
Curiously, whilst attaching pieces of string to the aforementioned gallery photograph boards, I met with the one artist I was most looking forward to seeing. The last time I bumped into Devon Sproule was in Manchester I think, when I suggested that she come over to play Cambridge at her earliest convenience, to which she replied 'I just need an invite and I'll be there for sure.' She finally got the invite then from those who do the proper inviting.
After hobnobbing with the waif-like festival virgin-ian, I popped over to the Radio 2 Stage to give my ears a workout. A healthy gathering had assembled before the second largest stage on site for a relative newcomer, Frank Turner.
Turner opened the festival with songs from 'Love, Ire and Song' kicking off with "I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous" filling the stage and surrounding area with the sound of new and to some, unfamiliar songs. In recent years Cambridge has played host to the likes of Nizlopi and Turner falls comfortably into this category, if we have to have categories that is.
In stark contrast, the family band Cherryholmes lit up the stage with sequined Nudie suits and cowboy hats, which in all fairness have probably never slapped a horse exactly, but may have been tipped towards many an audience over the past few years in Nashville. No single musician in this family takes the lead but instead democratically awaits his or her turn to impress the audience with their respective solos. I have to confess that the banjo has never looked quite so glamorous as when attached to Cia Leigh, who along with siblings Molly Kate, Skip and BJ, together with mum Sandy Lee and Pop Jere, made an impressive debut and have been ceremoniously added to the long list of bluegrass musicians to play at the festival.
The big surprise of the evening was the delightfully potty Tunng whose singer Becky Jacobs comes across as an uncompromising Bjork-like imp. I would wager that if you were to refer to Becky as an 'imp' in a random airport terminal, you would almost certainly be challenged to a pillow fight rather than the celebrated assault of fisticuffs provided time and again by the volatile Reykjavik imp, but I may be wrong. Combining 'folky acoustics and busy electronica' Tunng demonstrated a delightfully quirky sense of musicianship reminiscent of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, whose Cambridge appearance is still fondly remembered by some. It's also probably the one and only time in the history of the festival that we have witnessed a duet featuring a clockwork cuckoo. So that's why the caged bird sings - he's at Cambridge!
The much discussed Mercury Prize nominated Laura Marling brought the first night to a close with a short but sweet set. On stage for barely thirty minutes, Marling squeezed in most of the memorable songs from her debut album 'Alas I Cannot Swim' to an enthusiastic audience eager to let the young singer know they were there in support. There's a delicate fragility to this teenage song writer and it has to be said that her songs are both mature and well crafted for one so young. If great things are about to happen for Laura Marling, and I dare say they are, Cambridge can pride itself on being there to lend a hand, as it has to so many in the past.