Friday
Unfortunately, I manage to miss Mark Taylor as someone has seen my Fatea t-shirt and wants to know how to get an album to me. It's a festival so stopping and chatting is the good thing to do, particularly around the Club Tent, where there are so many aspiring and inspiring artists and their stories. (Address is on the website).
Next up are Kadia. Like me they have made the trek up from Dorset with the intent of playing the Club Tent, well enjoy the festival and play Club Tent, both boxes well and truly ticked, they are also one of three acts now playing the festival that were short listed for the Fatea Debut Album Of The Year, last year.
They start off with the traditional and many hundreds of years old song "The Elfin Knight", a tale of infidelity from back in the day, funny how some things never change.
Kadia stick to the more traditional side of their repertoire and it goes down exceptionally well, not only entertaining, but also the sort of set that wins friends. Any set that gets an audience clapping along of their own volition is a good one. Great song is matched by good banter, Yep they are definitely making an impression
Afterwards they find themselves with a few offers of appearances elsewhere, well worth the journey up from Dorset. They also get an invitation to join the Brian McNeill Session tomorrow. Cambridge is definitely a place that takes notice.
I manage to catch part of The Larks set. I'd bumped into the duo earlier in the day and have previously featured them in Fatea. They closed their set with a tribute to the late great David Bowie, Cambridge Folk Festival always provides the unexpected.
Definitely expected is the next set, one that is always a highlight for me, the most booked act in the festival's history, Brian McNeill.
I've been fortunate enough to know Brian a good number of years. He was the first winner of the Fatea Lifetime Achievement Award and the most booked act at Cambridge. On the Saturday he hosts the Session over at Stage Two, but the Club Tent is where you'll find him on a Friday and a little earlier in the evening these days.
Multi-instrumentalist, singer, writer, raconteur, social conscience, there are so many different sides to Brian, which leads to a real variety of performance over the years as he taps into different events. Yes there are the regular pieces, the singalong to his signature tune, "Join The Union", but there is always the unexpected, a song from the past that appears from nowhere, a new exploration that he may have taken up on his travels it's what makes a Friday night at Cambridge and is as much of an institution as Peter Buckley Hill's let night sets at the back of stage to, more of that later, perhaps.
I think I first came across Patch & The Giant on the much lamented Bob's Folkshow, but don't hold me to that. The band have been going about four years and in that time have really built their reputation on the live circuit with just a couple Eps and a handful of tracks to their recorded canon, though apparently that will change in the new year with confirmation of an album.
There's a reason Patch & The Giant have a good reputation for being a great festival band, it's because they know how to work a crowd, really get an atmosphere going and look as if they are enjoying every last moment of it and they've got a flugelhorn and when was the last time you heard a bad band with a flugelhorn?
How do you follow that? Well the answer is with something completely different and different is Jerron "Blind Boy" Paxton. He played Stage Two earlier in the evening and seemed pretty fired up by the more intimate Club Tent. He may not be as optically challenged as his name implies, but does capture that pre-war designation from an era, where the closest thing to welfare was teaching people how to sing.
There is an edge to Jerron's music, maybe not the same edge as was played out by the likes of Rob Johnson, but a real edge none-the-less. Close your eyes and in the lingering heat, you could almost imagine being somewhere in the dustbowl south.
One of the things that struck home, as well as the incredible quality of the performance, was the banter. Slightly cheeky, more like a busker than a stage performer, but with an underlying feeling that here was a man totally checking in on what was going on around him as if fight or flight could be an option any minute. A really exciting set from start to finish.