Folk Diary Monday

If you tie a green ribbon around your hat you signify that your true love has gone away. If you wear a yellow handkerchief it means your are going to shun flash company. If you tie a bunch of white or possibly blue ribbons all around your bonny boy’s waist it will let tone maidens know that he’s married. Was this some kind of olden days emoji system? I think we should be told.

I believe it was Mark Twain who said that if you tell a man that the are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy he will believe you, but if a public toilet shows “engaged” (“occupied”) he will turn the handle just to make sure.

Some very polite children from the international language school have photographed my hat as part of a scavenger hunt.

Adopting my usual plan of eschewing the camp showers and putting a pound in the box by the rugby club. If a geography teacher would care to come and shout at us, we would have the full 1970s school experience.

Choir from local church singing And Can It Be on the sea front. Wild urge to join in with Joe Hill style communist lyrics. (If it had been a socialist group, would certainly have sung a hymn.)

 I do not think that a diet of beer and pasties is sustainable in the long term. Or even the short ter

 Patronisingly ask small child if they are a fan of Irish Music. Told no, but they are a fan of Mad Dog McCrae. Their favourite songs are Beeswing and Johnny No Legs (which turns out to be a speeded up Mrs McGraw/My Son John.)

 I remember when Mad Dog McCrae played after parties at Trowbridge and pop up gigs at Glastonbury. They are now mighty and legendary. They have undergone a reverse evolution, less punky and more folkie. I am not sure you are allowed to use the word “pikey” in a song, even if he did kill your goldfish, with a fag.

I definitely didn’t have something in my eye during Beeswing and actually sob during Gay Pirates (yo ho sebastian, let’s go far away, somewhere where the captain won’t be mad.)

Definitely the right call to hear the loud party band at the Bulverton and eschew Spiers and Boden at the Ham, (who are iconic, but whom I have heard many times before.) Which suggests that buying the Season Ticket (everything but the headline gigs) rather than the All In Ticket (everything including the headline gigs) was the right call

I am not a gate keeper, but I am far from sure that a funk band becomes a folk funk bad just because it has an accordion in it.

I Am not very good at dancing about architecture. Elye Cuthbertson is apparently winning awards for being most promising musician in any genre. He plays long complex tunes on the accordion: saw him comparing notes with Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne. My notes say things like “zig zag shaped phrases cut off from above”. This may not help anyone very much.

The Wilson Family sang loud unaccompanied harmony music, in the vicinity of Rolling Home and Union Miner Stand Together. Exceptionally good.

The Guide Hut was full for John Kirkpatrick. (I didn’t get in.)

 Ended night in campfire marquee again. Joined by entirety of steampunk morris side who know hundred of songs. Lady with brilliant voice sang a complex pagan inspired version of possibly Twa Magicians. I sang the dirtiest version of Landlords Fill the Flowing Bowl I known. Tom Pearse has sadly to be abandoned because this Devonian crowd didn’t know the chorus.

 It rained. 

On Wednesday there is a three way clash between Robb Johnson, the Oysterband and Granny’s Attic

Pasties -1

Bacon roll -1

Beeswing -1

My Bonny Boy is Young But He’s Growing -2

Songs by Leo Rossleson - 2

Total time listening to music -6.5

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