Friday
Regular readers of my column will know that the Friday and the rest of the weekend for some of the Fatea team, starts with breakfast at The Unicorn. It's under new management again this year.
The new landlord has brightened the place up. It's more cheerful and welcoming, more importantly he's brought back the all you can eat for six quid breakfast, so it's a huge thumbs up from the Fatea team and an absolute certainty they've got our breakfast business for the weekend.
One of the Fatea traditions at Cambridge is the unveiling of the crew shirt on the Saturday. I drop the shirts off for distribution so the team have got them for tomorrow and then park the car up for the day.
As I wander through the site, the clean up crew are still hard at it, though their job has been made easier this year. Cambridge has changed it's beer glass policy. You've pretty much always been able to buy a festival tankard to commemorate your visit to the festival.
If a glass tankard wasn't your cup of tea, then your drink was served in a brittle plastic glass that used to little the site all weekend. This year it was a solid plastic glass that cost you a two quid deposit. At the end of the festival you either handed the glass in for you money back or took it home. As a scheme it seems to have worked. The site was definitely cleaner this year.
I meet up with newest Fatea team member, Allan Wilkinson, whose festival review can be found elsewhere on the site and then head backstage at the Club Tent to finish writing up Thursday.
Friday proper starts off with the Tim O'Brien fiddle and mandolin workshop. Tim has played the festival before but it's been a long time. Some would say too long.
He's got a good crowd. Like most workshops it's a combination of performing a couple of songs and going through the techniques that brought those songs about.
It's a knowledgeable audience and there's some in depth questions. O'Brien has a knack for making the subject sound interesting for the less initiated. The session starts on the fiddle and progresses to the mandolin.Tim, knows his history and puts the songs and tunes into a context. I don't pretend to be a musician, but sat fascinated through the entire workshop and it's been a while since I've done that.
There's time to grab a cup of coffee before people start gathering for the next event at the Club Tent, the Mojo Interview. Normally it's a one on one interview sometimes with the odd song performed acoustically, sometimes just a chat.
This year it's something different, four members of Imagined Village, Martin Carthy, Billy Bragg, Chris Woods and Simon Emmerson. There's lots of greetings backstage. Billy has been given a quarter size guitar with a "This Machine Kills Fascists" motiff.
Time is pressing the interview is about to start. The quartet stop chatting to each other and head towards the stage to start talking for an audience. The interview starts around the Imagined Village project and the various aspects of English song and how the past has influenced the future.
It's not long before the two issues that blight English folk raise their head, English nationalism and what to do with the tradition, take it forward or stagnate it.
The view from the stage was clear, the English can be as proud of their music as the Celts without being nationalistic and music is a living tradition. There is a place for songs in their original context, but there's also a place for them to move into.
It's time to leave the Club Tent for the first time this festival. I've got to leave before it's over and miss Martin Carthy's Rvai Shankar monologue.
Mauvais Sort stunned the audience when they opened the festival on the Radio Two Stage. All the indictations showed that they would do the same again this year. It transpires the band's new album features live tracks from their previous performance here.
The performance kicks in and goes from 0 to 60 in about two kicks of a shoe. Mauvais Sort means Bad Spell and the band certainly enchant the audience. It was a hell of a way to kick the cobwebs out of people. Mauvis Sort were out to have a good time and make sure that everyone else was going to.
The band perform mainly in French and variations of said language. It's a set full of pace enjoyment and audience participation. They are a band that know how to work a crowd and work them hard.
Canadian bands go down very well at Cambridge and there's a reason for it, they deliver. There's so much they have to offer. It doesn't matter one iota that you don't understand a word they're singing, half the time it's just using the voice as an instrument anyway. You know what they're about and that's all that matters.
By the time they reach the end of their set there are people in the audience pretty much danced out. Brought down by a combination of pace and humidity.
Mauvais Sort are a real party band and whilst it would have been easy to question an early afternoon slot it seemed to work well.