Sidmouth Festival Diary [Sunday]

Today I have been mostly listening to legends.

Lunchtime — Martin Simpson! Played his twiddly bluesy slide guitar and sang a song about a tree and a song about a Chilean singer who was killed by the junta. (“His hands were kind hands”: he sang it in tribute to Dick Gaughan.)

Early afternoon — Steve Knightley doing what Steve Knightley does best, which is basically stealing the show, if not the festival. This was Steve Knightley “and friends”, friends including the aforementioned Martin Simpson (accompanying him on a Dylan cover), traditional singer Paul Dowes, the guy with the Cajun from Track Dogs, and the young man who plays the new age kettle drums. This is probably not the technical term. The story is that Steve heard him busking in Sidmouth last year and more or less said ‘join the band’. 

Steve sang an obscure Martin Carthy number called His Name is Andrew, and everyone finished with the obligatory song about tin miners. 

Oh, and someone called Phil Beer joined him on the stage. Definitely not a Show of Hands reunion, though: they did the Blind Fiddler which is very much a Phil song. 

Am I the only one who thinks that one particular stanza of one of his newer songs is distinctly troubling? 

A traditional African band from Zimbabwe opened up for him. They were very good. They sang some catchy songs we didn’t know, danced a lot, and finished up with the possibly familiar Wim-a-Way. And encored with a kind of body percussion number, which originated with miners who weren’t allowed to chat and communicated by stomping their feet. 

Evening: Maddy Prior and Peter Knight!!! A late addition because the headliner was indisposed: they described it as a work in progress, which actually generated a real warmth and intimacy on the stage. Peter Knight is, of course, the fiddler all the other folk fiddlers want to be — his style is more classical than ‘diddly-dee’. Distinctly not a Steeleye Span tribute act. Maddy’s actually mad-sounding reading of Bedlam Boys was a tour de force, but the highlight was the incest-and-fratricide ballad The Sheath and the Knife.

Subjected Middle Bar to Pie in the Sky, it being Sunday. They shouted out That’s a Lie in the appropriate places. Tried the late night song session at the Bedford, which is very full and has excellent singing (the Goblin Band were sitting right in front of me) but struggles to compete with the rest of the pub and the tunes session in the other room. 

I played safe and sang It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, which went down about as well as you'd expect.