Beverley Folk Festival
Beverley Folk Festival 2011
Friday June 17th - Sunday June 19th
Multiple Venues
Beverley Yorkshire
Friday - Saturday - Sunday - Gallery
Beverley Folk Festival - Saturday
Saturday starts with a shower and breakfast, it also starts with the sound of rain. Fortunately it turns out to be relatively short, it also happened to be the heaviest shower of the day. Most of the day was actually quite warm, which prevented the campsite and festival village from turning into a quagmire.
What other rain there was pretty light and when the clouds cleared there was quite a lot of heat in the day. My first task turned out to be finding a charger for my phone, having left mine back in Dorset.
It gave me a chance to wander around Beverley and watch the morris parade. The various sides present seemed to represent a fair cross section of the morris traditions and its really good to see this being a very active part of the festival.
A children's morris side was performing in one of the market areas and seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely, supported by family friends and onlookers. Similarly, children are catered for well by the festival, having their own list of events that includes music and singing workshops alongside the obligatory face painting etc. Beverley really does seem to be a family friendly festival.
There were quite a lot of children on site, including many attending the concerts, but apart from one crying baby, which the parent, quickly took out of the hall to quieten elsewhere, I can't remember an incident where a child may have lessened someone else's enjoyment of the event.
Having found a charger, first on site action of the day was to get around to the media bus and get it plugged in. It was also a chance to catch up with fellow journalists, compare the day before and plan, as much as you can plan any multi-venue festival, the Saturday.
First up on my list was Sunderland based singer/songwriter Paul Liddle. Paul has recently released a new album which, together with his earlier releases, has made me a fan of his recorded works and I was looking forward to seeing him live and having a bit of a catch up. Unfortunately, his car had other ideas, failing to deliver him to the festival at all, let alone on time for the start.
As they say, it's an ill wind that blows no good and the prime beneficiaries of this were Moore, Moss & Rutter, the current Radio Two Young Tradition holders who now had the job of opening the Wold Top Marquee. Apparently they played there last night at some ungodly hour as part of the late night session, but probably have yet to pick up some of the folk habits that preclude earlyish starts to the day :, which made them ideal candidates for the fill in opening slot.
It worked out quite well for me as well. I'd planned to see Moore, Moss & Rutter latter in the day, but I was now free to catch another group that had clashed.
As you would expect from an award winning group, their instrumental skills were quite simply awesome. I am constantly amazed by how much young talent adorns stages around the folk circuit and plays with so much fluency. You automatically seem to forget that a lot of them have already been playing most of their lives, often having ten years of experience or more of an instrument by the time they're eighteen.
What did impress me about them as well, was the way they communicated with their audience. They were there with the banter that allowed them to retune as necessary as the set progressed. There's a lot of experienced performers that haven't really got that part of their set off pat.
Being instrumentalists rather than singers, allows them to follow the tried and tested method of giving self penned tunes silly names, including in their case a song title based on a virtual fishing game. All in all a really impressive performance. If they are playing a festival or a club near you, pop along and support them, it'll be well worth while.
Next up was a singer songwriter who recently sent a cd for review to the Fatea office, which impressed us enough to offer her a slot on the Fatea Showcase Sessions, Wendy Arrowsmith. If you had to describe Wendy in one word, it would be extrovert.
During the course of her songs, she had the audience singing and la li lahing along to her songs, including in one case, accompanying actions to go with it. She has a real bubbly personality that really pushes flamboyance into her set, but not enough to detract from the songs, which is important as many of her songs have important points to make on the human condition, including the misery we inflict on each other.
Her set just seemed to fly by and was thoroughly entertaining through out, she made the Wold Top Marquee feel like a front room, as if you were having friends around for an evening's entertainment like it used to be in the old days.