Cruel Folk's Cambridge Folk Festival Diary, 2008
By Sean Holden
The Cambridge Folk Festival is undoubtedly the biggest event of the year on the British folk scene, and the one that folk acts of all descriptions most want to play at. Consequently, it is hard to get booked to play there; your act will need to be big enough to be well-known, and only a relatively small number of acts have the level of recognition that's needed.
However, Cambridge is unusual for such a large and prestigious festival in that it actively promotes lesser-known acts. The festival organisers do this in two ways. First, they book smaller acts to play Showcases in the Club Tent – the smallest of the three stages at Cambridge – and many acts that are booked in this way appear in later years on the larger stages: Seth Lakeman and Cara Dillon come to mind from recent years. Secondly, large sections of the weekend are given over to the local folk clubs – Cambridge, St Neots, Ely, Hitchin and Acoustic Routes – who choose from their own favourite acts and also give some time to sessions that anyone at all can sign up for to perform a fifteen minute spot of three songs.
Cruel Folk sign up for just such a spot on a regular basis, and 2008 was no exception. While we play other festivals, such as Wimborne, Glastonbury, Hawkfest and Broadstairs as booked artists throughout the year, the chance to play to a potentially large, hardcore folk audience and gaining some new followers while selling some albums in the process is far too valuable to miss.
The way it works is simple: you need to queue. The sign-up times are advertised in the festival programme but be warned: you need patience, sun cream, and the willingness to miss one or more of the bands you came to see. The reason for this is that the spots are very popular. For a sign-in time of 4pm we would usually join the queue at midday. The queue is outside and hence the need for sun cream. It is also not in a place where any of the stages are visible, and so at best you will hear music drifting over from somewhere else – that's how I got to hear the fantastic Eliza Carthy this year. Oh well. So that you don't spend four hours queuing only to find the spots are all full, organisers from the folk club will usually come out on a regular basis and count the number of acts currently queuing. They will tell you if the spots are all full, in which case you may be able to get your name put down as a standby, or just hang on for another few hours for the next signing up time. No, this is not a joke – people actually do it!
On the good side of queuing to sign up, there is what I like to refer to as “The Fellowship of the Cambridge Signing Up Queue”. Basically, it's a nice way to meet interesting performers who you will probably bump into again on the folk circuit in the future.
Should you make it to the sign-up time and get a spot, the organisers will take note of your PA requirements, before the Performing Rights Society pounce on you for details of what you're going to perform. This is not in fact in any way scary. The society exists to make sure that songwriters get paid for the use of their work in live performance etc. Don't worry if you're performing cover versions as it's not you that has to pay, but they take the details of the songs you're performing so that the right person gets paid at some point. If you're performing material to which you own the rights, and you're a member of the society, this means you get paid, so everybody's happy. A short time after the signing up is complete a board appears outside the club tent showing who is playing and at what time. Now you have some time to relax and collect your instruments before getting backstage about a half hour before your performance time in order to get ready.