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Great British Folk Festival

Venue: Butlins
Town: Skegness
Date: 2nd-4th December
Website: http://www.bigweekends.com

Features

The great thing about festivals is that everyone has different experiences. Multiple venues will always force choices on people, there are certain acts that you might to watch for a whole host of different reasons.

You end up chatting to different people so your festival will always be different from the family and friends you go to the event with. In trying to capture as much of the event as possible the Fatea team heads off in separate directions during the event, trying to capture as much as we can.

We also look as to what other things the festival makes us think of, how we and the artists got to where we did and what we both brought and took away from the event in both an emotional and physical context.

Below you'll find Fatea's Phil Carter's view of the festival. Normally Phil is found exclusively behind the camera, but for the Great British Folk Festival we've persuaded him to put his festival into words.

I also thought it would be a good idea just to have a look at some of the back catalogue of some of the artists that played this year. The albums that allow us to take some of the glitter and memories back home with us.

GBFF Album Reviews

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Get Carter!! A Festival Perspective

Let's face it, English seaside resorts in December are not usually regarded as warm and welcoming places to visit. However, driving into Ingoldmells on Friday 2nd December, the air was indeed cold and bracing, and the massive structure of the giant Butlins Skyline Pavilion looked resplendent against the backdrop of a bright sunshine filled cloudless blue sky.

Meeting up with Neil King, ( aka the FATEA controller), we headed into the town of Skegness in order to stock up on essential supplies for the weekend, with the only non-liquid items placed in the basket consisting of Bombay mix and peanuts.

Back up the road to the Butlins resort, there was now a queue of cars along the main road waiting in turn to enter through the main gate. Within a few minutes, we were parked up, and after locating the main check-in desk, where we were handed our accommodation pack and chalet access cards.

Now, up until January of this year, I had never stepped foot in a Butlins resort, and I guess like a lot of people, I had fixed preconceptions of what lay behind the perimeter fencing.

I visited the same Butlins resort for the first time back in January when I photographed the Rock and Blues Big Weekend festival. I had an amazing weekend, enjoying accommodation of a high standard, wonderful food and some tremendous music to boot. But what impressed me most was the relaxed but professional team of people working backroom at the event.

To have the chance to once again work alongside the very same team, Dave Hill from Tenacity PR, Phil and Bev Knight from Street Music, Ian Blenkinsop, Sue Marchant from BBC Cambridge, Allan Wilkinson from Northern Sky, and Jae Hopkins from the Butlins management team was an offer to good to miss.

We dumped bags and beers in the chalet, and headed down to the main concert venue to pick-up press passes and check-in with the backstage team. Then it was back to the digs to prepare the cameras for the evening sessions, but not before visiting the prestigious Yacht Club restaurant for the evening meal. The red wine and sumptuous food enjoyed in relaxed surroundings is indeed a far cry from the usual festival mealtime ritual of a hastily scoffed plate of something indescribable, passing off as festival food.

We consult the evening programme schedule, and decide on who is going to cover which artists on what stage. For Friday evening, the FATEA team is firing on two out of three cylinders, with our third snapper, Mark Winpenny, unfortunately delayed in London, but due to arrive on Saturday.

The backstage access to both main venues enables us both to bypass the by now enormous but fast-moving queues into the auditoriums, and movement between the two venues becomes effortless throughout the weekend. This proved very handy on a number of occasions due to clashes with artists, kicking-off their sets on different stages at the same time.

And so the weekend began, with myself covering the Emily Smith and Ralph McTell sets in the Vegas style 'Reds' venue.

I'm not even going to attempt to report in detail on any of the weekend gigs, as between Neil King here on FATEA and Allan Wilkinson over on his excellent website www.northernsky.co.uk , you have already been provided with excellent and informed reviews of all the artists and bands who appeared over the weekend. However, as is our want, the FATEA team do compare notes at the end of a festival in order to compare thoughts on which artists stood out for them, which artists, maybe previously unknown have lit up the radar screen etc.

If I may indulge myself, here are my highlights from the weekend.

Without doubt, the one artist I was most looking forward to seeing was Ralph McTell.

It was about twenty years ago when I went along to my first Ralph McTell gig at the City Varieties theatre in Leeds. I'd always loved his music, and in my youth had learnt to play guitar not by using the then traditional Bert Weedon instruction book, but with the help and guidance of my school music teacher, who taught me to play a number of Ralph's songs.

That concert in Leeds twenty years ago re-ignited my dormant interest in folk music, and as a result, I endeavoured to catch a Ralph McTell gig at any opportunity over subsequent years.

I've never had the opportunity to photograph Ralph, and so to be able to do so in an official capacity was something I was very much looking forward to. Needless to say, Ralph's set proved to be one of the highlights of the weekend, not just for me, but for many of the weekend festival goers reporting their approval on the various folk blogs and forums.

I got my photos too, not the standard concert photos, as these days there are plenty of decent images to be had from anyone with a reasonable digital camera within twenty feet of the stage. What I wanted to capture was the relationship between the man and his guitar, and thankfully my parking spot front of stage gave me just the right angle to set to work on composing the photo I so much wanted to take.

I spoke with Donard, Ralph's long time road manager before the show, as I was aware that Ralph may not always approve of photographs being taken during his performances. But Donard explained to me that this rule tends to be relaxed at festival gigs.

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