Co-Operative Cambridge Folk Festival
Thursday
Here we are at the start of another Co-Operative Cambridge Folk Festival Weekend. Can it really be a year already? The Festival has a new sponsor Co-Operative, one of the UK's largest community based retailers. The sun is shining at the moment, but there's been a promise of showers, something the forecaster get right.
This year, as last, Fatea is putting on an exhibition of photos from previous years in the bar at Mainstage. The photographers taking part are all photo pit regulars, the people that you see the backs of during the first three songs. The Cambridge regulars are collectively known as the pit ponies. Those taking part in the gallery are, Alice Ralph, Phil Carter, Phil Ryalls, Allan Wilkinson, Mark Winpenny and myself, Neil King. Claire Borley, Cat, Nick Elliott and Bryan Legard complete the unofficial collective. You can see the photos from the exhibition in our Gallery Pages.
A remarkably smooth car journey gets us to the site. Tents are set up ready for the weekend before we head off to the Tally Ho in Trumpington for the traditional pre-festival lunch. The rest of the team start to arrive frm the various parts of the country.
We get there just in time as a heavy shower with hail arrives and does it's best to drench everything in it's path, glad we got the tents up in the dry.
The afternoon is spent dodging showers, climbing stepladders, stringing up photographs and catching up on people's years. We can hear the site gradually coming to life, that build of noise and excitement that tells you, you are no longer at Cherry Hinton Park, but the Co-Operative Cambridge Folk Festival.
Prior to the first band it's time to go and get passed up. One of the reasons Cambridge flows so smoothly is the strength of the organisation, making sure the right people are in the right place at the right time. For photographers, that means being at the media caravan ten minutes before an act is due to go on. As a group we are escorted to the correct stage, released into the pit for the first three songs, no flash, then escorted out again. The exception is the Club Tent that doesn't have a pit and with the audience going right up to the stage, is the most difficult one of the venues to photograph, particularly when it's crowded.
The team split up, I'm going to be starting the evening at the Club Tent. On the way there, I bump into half of Sunday Driver on their way for a quick refreshment before opening the 45th Co-Operative Cambridge Folk Festival. As part of their set they ask the audience to try and find a nice adjective to describe their sound, I've not taken an adjective, my entry is a noun for a new genre..
Noun-Inglofolk. A blending of the words India, Anglo(Saxon) and folk, to describe a genre of music from the new Britain, which brings together music inspired by India with that inspired by England.
Sunday Driver are masters of Inglofolk. The Cambridge based sextet are influenced by the cities of London and Calcutta from Victorian times, and dress accordingly. It's worth noting that the Indian clothing is still of the here and now, whilst the English costume has dated and has something of a fancy dress feel about it, it gives the show a real visual element, but not to the point where it detracts from the quality of the music. I guess it also says something about fashion and how adherence to it separates the generations, perhaps a price of creativity.
I was really impressed by the band's recent "In The City Of The Dreadful Night", live it gains another dimension as Chandy Nath's vocals swoop and soar around you. There's a very affirming element to Sunday Driver's sound, whilst some of the songs are quite dark, they seem to be very rich in energy. I'm not sure of what the style's called, but there was one piece where Chandy was using her voice as an instrument, rather than as a conveyor of words, simply stunning.
It transpires that the band have been plying their craft locally for longer than I'd realized. It looks like they have found a sound that should be able to reach out to a bigger audience.
From a comparatively local band it was time to make a switch to a band that had hauled themselves to the festival from West Wales, Calan.
Calan released their Maartin Alcock produced debut album "Bling" back in January. The album is named after the band's accordion player, Bethan Rhiannon's taste in clothes. Apparently she's ordered a pair of pink, paten leather clogs for that the dancing section of their set. Unfortunately the band appear to have also brought plague with them, with both the aforementioned Bethan and guitarist Chris Ab Alun, not feeling a hundred percent.
The illness impacts the band's performance and it really would be unfair to judge them on this outing, Bethan even had to leave the stage at one point. It left them a little subdued and despite strong efforts they couldn't quite find the vital spark to lift the performance from good to memorable
The band are a five piece, also counting Llinos Eleri Jones(harp), Angharad Sian(fiddle) and Patrick Rimes(fiddle) and put together a good set, influenced by traditional Welsh music and giving it a contemporary twist. It's instrumental based and mixes old tunes with songs penned from within the band.
Calan are a young band, at the start of their careers and on this showing there's some real potential. One thing they need to work on though is their between song banter. This is going to sound harsh, but it is meant constructively. There seems to be a lack of focus as to where the chat is going, too much of it concentrated on being Welsh(nothing wrong with being proud of your country, but not all the time) and just sort of meandering, it got wearing after a while. The exception was the introduction to "Manamanamonkey" which was spot on and brought an element of audience participation.
All in all I enjoyed the set and would really like the opportunity to see the band at their full powers. You could feel they are a band with more in them and it's a shame they couldn't tap it, due to circumstances beyond their control.
Calan were the first band of the festival to introduce me to a new instrument, the pibgorn. The pibgorn is, apparently, a carved horn with an enclosed double reed. It'll be worth twelve at Scrabble and a bonus fifty for using all seven letters.