Thursday
The third song is import because it's the last song the photographers get to stay in the pit for. As I approach the backstage area for Stage Two I hear the last few chords of "Box Of Stones" and there's still hope, a hope that's dashed by the sight of my fellow snappers coming in my direction from the stage.
I also notice that the pit at Stage Two is significantly tighter this year and a disadvantage of having no Main Stage running is that the Sky Arts team are also in the pit with tripod mounted cameras making movement even more difficult.
Still all is not lost, there's nothing to stop me dropping into the VIP enclosure and watch the rest of his set from there. It proves to be an excellent choice. Whilst I've not previously seen a lot of Benjamin Francis Leftwich (BFL, although that does make him feel like a nuclear power station) I really enjoyed last year's album "Last Smoke Before The Snowstorm"
He's an artist that seems to have a lot going for him. Apparently he's got rugged good looks, but more importantly, he knows how to write and perform songs. Judging by this display, he also knows how to engage with his audience, with a good line in banter and an almost guaranteed cheer for comparing Cambridge Folk Festival with some of the, shall we say, more damp festivals earlier in the summer.
The band get a break mid-set as BFL performs a series of songs on stage solo, before being rejoined for the final numbers including "Stole You Away", "Don't Go Slow" and the show closing "Atlas Hands". All in all a set that could be considered a real success and apart from that slightly bitter feeling for having missed the start, I was really impressed.
Time to crank up the volume with a foray into the decidedly electric world of Dry The River, a band I was first introduced to via SXSW, but also one that fell into the category of heard but not seen.
Following a smooth stage transition, the tattoo festooned band licked in right from the start. A sonic soundscape providing hook laden melodies for the falsetto lead harmonies to work their way around.
If I only had one word to describe the band, it would be energy, both in sound an performance, with the bass player in-particular throwing his instrument around almost like a two year old in a full blown temper tantrum.
Looking at the crowd there were definitely a few that weren't quite sure what to make of Dry The River and talking to some people afterwards, they still didn't, but that was more than offset by those that did.
Dry The River are in many ways what a Cambridge Folk Festival Thursday is all about, that opportunity to try something different and by and large, this worked.
It was definitely safer ground for the next artist, Billy Bragg doing songs from the Mermaid Avenue recordings to celebrate the 100th Birthday of Woody Guthrie. Billy moved to Dorset, home of the Trade Union Movement, a good few years ago, definitely long enough to be considered a local and to have picked up on some of the phraseology of the area, as sneaked out in couple of bits of the between song banter.
This wasn't a celebration of the hits of Woody Guthrie, it was a celebration of the man and it wasn't a surprise when Woody's family approached Billy to provide music to otherwise lost songs as he very much has that Woody Guthrie attitude to life an politics.
This was one of those sets you had to be there for. There wasn't a tangent Billy was prepared to miss, including a short, but humorous investigation of the word tumescent, where else would you here that from a stage?
If you didn't understand the importance of Woody Guthrie at the start of this set, you definitely did by the end. Away from the man that academia try to portray was a man with his heart very much in the right place. A man with passion about everything he did, be it ordinary or extraordinary. He wrote about the mundane and the magnificent, the political and the emotional and most of us barely scratch the surface of his work.
Through kindred spirit Billy Bragg we had fifty odd minutes of getting under his skin, all in all a great way to end Thursday. Well not quite end, there was time to get to the bar and share a pint or two from a festival tankard and some banter. Fingers crossed it looks like being dry for the weekend.