Thursday
After catching up with more old friends, I notice the compere making her way back to the stage, so I pick up my camera and head back in. Alex Patterson, Bryony & Grace Lemon are locally based, initially I think that Alex hails from the other side of the pond, but like Bryony and Grace is a Cambridge girl. They are a young band, I think two are still in their teens, but might have tipped over the twenty threshold. The age doesn't matter. Bryony was one of the youngest ever performers at the festival when she first took to a Cambridge stage.
I've really been looking forward to this one as I'm intrigued as to where they've taken the music. At heart they are a tune playing traditional band, but Alex has been starting to write a lot more of her own songs and, it transpires, has put four of them onto an EP.
There's a bit of a surprise at the start as Alex is joined by her sister on stage, I'm later informed she's called Ellie, and during the course of the set they become a floating trio/quartet. In whatever combination the band perform, the standard of the musicianship is extremely high, but it's almost like having two sets rolled into one.
The reason for this is that Alex's songs whist traditional, aren't local traditional, they have a definite US influence and the accompaniment changes accordingly. It gives the set an unusual blend, but it all works as a whole.
Alex has an extraordinary voice and one that's difficult to describe, almost to the point that it's easier to say what it's not. It's not a mid-Atlantic singer/songwriter voice, it's not a pitch perfect highly confident singing voice that is barely distinguishable from many other pitch perfect highly confident singing voices. What it is, is an incredible voice with real character that will allow you to confidently say, 'that's Alex Patterson' when she's played on the radio.
If it sounds like I'm focusing on Alex, hands up guilty, but in my defence it's also because the singing tended to focus the attention on Alex. When the trio were playing tunes, she slipped back into being one of the band.
As I mentioned before, Bryony and Grace have a good number of years of experience under their youthful belts and the standard of playing on the stage really was superb, fresh and lively with plenty of passion is there anything else that you need in your music.
Next is one of those contrasts that Cambridge is rightly famous for. From the relatively sedate world of traditional music to the raucous riot of skunk! Skunk for the uninitiated is a combination of skiffle and punk and masters of the genre, Hobo Jones & The Junkyard Dogs are about to take to the stage, it's show time.
Dressed as pearly kings and queens would look if they were punk chimney sweeps, Hobo Jones and crew are a good honest festival crowd pleasing band. They 'adapt' material from pretty much any genre and adopt it into their set.
The banter is on the risqué side and this is 99% about having a great time and getting the audience into being part of the set/festival, rather than passive watchers. Seasick Steve may make a bit of a fuss about a three string guitar, Hobo Jones have a proper skiffle bass, one string, a stick and a soundbox.
Part way through the set is a real surprise, Bryony & Grace Lemon return to the stage clutching their whistles and stand between Hobo Jones and his washboard player, looking as if they're worried they might get eaten.
It's time for the more serious part of the set, although also done with good humour, "The Tyburn Jig" a song that has on occasion been mistaken as being traditional. It's about a fictional slaying of a tax man and his team that leads to a man being hanged at Tyburn, an infamous set of gallows in London where thirty six people could be hanged at once, and they say Henry Ford invented the production line.
Bryony and Grace provide extra instrumentation for the instrumental jig section that comes at the end of the song. I learn later that the guest appearance only came about following a snatched conversation after their set and a single rehearsal before Hobo Jones & The Junkyard Dogs went on, you couldn't tell.
This was good honest fun, it's not the most sophisticated set you're ever going to hear, nor is it intended to be. Instruments were handed from the stage for an encore, that included the theme tune of Dad's Army and a lot of noise and singing from the crowd, brilliant.