Lindisfarne *  Ralph McTell * Kitty Macfarlane * Jeff Warner * Ragged Trousers * Alice Jones * Mary Humphreys & Anahata * Annie Winter & Paul Downes * Damien Barber * Tony Hall * Sheenah Wellington * Eileen O'Brien & Connor Keane * Harbour Lights * Bill Murray * Hannah Rarity * National Folk Ensemble * Nick Hart * Merry Hell * Mike O'Conner and Barbara Griggs * Steve Knightley * Robb Johnson * Jim Causley * The Dartmoor Entertainers * Matthew Byrne * Martin Simpson * John Kirkpatrick * Nancy Kerr and James Fagan * Sandra Kerr * Sam Kelly and the Lost Boys * Brian Peters * Broom Bezzums * Rachel McShane and the Cartographers * Harri Endersby * Granny's Attic * Iona Fyle * Grace Smith * Thom Ashworth * Ben Walker & Rob Harbron * Jimmy Aldridge and Sid Goldsmith * Blackbeard's Tea Party *Amethyst Kiah * The Shee 

Friday

It rained and it rained and it rained. Piglet said never before -- and he had been coming to Sidmouth for goodness knows how long... two years was it or maybe three? --  had he seen such rain. And first they cancelled the fireworks and then they cancelled the parade. Then they moved all the things from the Ham to the Bulverton. And then they had to close the Bulverton, 20 minute into Granny’s Attic’s set, because it wasn’t safe. The marquee, I mean, not the band.

My very small tent didn’t literally blow away. In fact I am quite impressed by the extent to which modern tents behave like Chumbawamba during a high wind. But in the end one of the polls split. It was, however, pretty dry, so I decided my best bet was to sit the storm out in what increasingly resembled a large flat canvass bag. I should probably have arranged an interview with the media about world peace.

I did get to hear Sid and Jinmy being relaxed and chatty, and the Shee singing Tom Paines’ bones and an American gospelly bluesy lady who wasn’t at all my kind of thing. but history will record that the festival should have ended with the Thunderbird barn dance last night.

Written in Subway near Exeter bus station (on an iphone)

Thursday

Lady spent entire concert writing postcards and letters. Full on address book, envelopes, stamps on her knee. I found this both distracting and disrespectful to the band.

I am fairly serious: the difference between going to a concert and listening to a CD is that you are in a big room of people who all love the music and are all singing, or crying, or laughing, or stomping their feet. Kind of sacramental. One infidel spoils the magic.

She told me afterwards how brilliant the band was and what a great show it has been, so I couldn’t even decently “tut” at her.

I managed to hear eight different acts today, including four of my most very favourites. And also a lecture about Sabine Baring Gould, the Other Victorian folk song collector, who also wrote one or two moderately well known hymns. He realised (which Sharp did not) that the songs which “peasants” were singing at the end of the 19th century were in many cases not written by immemorial pagan bards in prehistory, but were for the most part seventeenth and eighteenth century pop songs.

Sid and Jimmy (Aldridge and Goldsmith) in combination with Nancy and James (Kerr and Fagan) is as good a double bill as you can get, and very possibly the best ticket of the week. Sid and Jimmy are up for a folk award for their traditional Norfolk love song “the Reedcutters Daughter”. They’d obviously been told to cut the chatter . Sid in particular was not allowed to talk about soil erosion or environmental issues. So they chattered about not chattering. But truthfully they need to rebrand themselves as folksingers and story tellers: each song has a narrative associated with its genesis which audiences need to hear. A little like Simon and Garfunkel, they don’t exactly sing harmony but their two voices some how merge into one perfect voice.

Nancy and James did Hearts That Long for the Land and Farewell to the Gold and Robb Johnson’s Herald of Free Enterprise, which is somehow improved by no longer being topical. And then they did Dance To Your Daddy and melted everyone’s hearts.

The weather arrived. There is apparently a serious danger that the Ham Marquee may blow away. They have already had to cancel the fireworks. I felt that spending a whole evening looking as if I’d fallen in a swimming pool was probably not going to be too much fun, so I stuffed dry clothes into my bag and changed at the top of the hill. Which actually made me feel quite smug. And dry. (Remind me to write an amusing essay about Modesty one of these weeks.)

Lady interrupts my writing to ask if she can sit at the empty table, because she lives here, and tells me that if I lived here it would be worth getting a loyalty card. When she first lived here no one locked their doors because their were no baddies, but it’s not like that now, oh dear me. She is in a choir, because she lives here.

Blackbeard’s Tea Party are basically my favourite band in the world. They started out, a decade ago, as a not un Mawkinish acoustic set up, busking in front of a church in York, but album by album they have become folkier and rockier. They now have two drum kits and arrangements which slip into the realm of self parody, in an entirely good sense. But there is still folk fiddle and folk accordion and a mostly traditional set list. Chickens are on rafts, diamonds are bound for the Davis Straits, Captain Kidd leaves William Moore in his gore and the landlord endlessly refills the flowing bowl. The lead singer and accordionist is a part time morris dancer who leaps around the stage and into the audience. They are a brand, a cult, a phenomenon, and they never forget it is folk music.

Today has been designated their tenth birthday, and there are balloons and party hats. Not only do they do a full electric set, but after a brief break they come back onto the stage and provide ceilidh music until 1 in the morning. In keeping with the ten-year-old birthday theme, they come on dressed as creditable Thunderbirds characters, to the International Rescue theme. The caller has been prevailed onto to dress as Jeff Tracey. In the interval, as is traditional, a rapper side do a demonstration. They do a full sword dance routine in the style and costume of the Tellytubbies. We take our folk seriously.

Before Blackbeard start, Thom Ashworth does a set. I heard him earlier in the day in the Bedford. He explained that he was in receipt of a bursary from Cecil Sharp House to research what it means to be English in a post colonial world. (I mean there are lots of things I am angry about and would like the money to make an album, he explains, but you can’t put that on a grant application.) Quite a tough gig, I would have said, being one man with a guitar in front of an audience who are waiting for the madness which his Blackbeard’s Tea Party.

He opened up with Alan Tyne of Harrow, one of the best highwayman songs and certainly the one with the best tune. (He sings “now in Newgate I am bound and by the law indicted / to hang on Tyburn tree’s my fate of which I’m much afrighted.” Nancy and James always sang it as “by the law convicted” which doesn’t rhyme. Jim Moray thinks Alan Tyne of Harrow may be closely related to an Irishman called Valentine O’Hara.)

There’s a man on the stage. Singing a song about a highwayman. A song that generations of singers have sung. A song which is very largely speaking for itself.

“But being of a courage keen and likewise able bodied,
Well, I robbed Lord Lowndes on the King's highway with my pistols heavy loaded.
I clapped my pistols to his breast which caused him for to quiver,
And five hundred pound in ready gold to me he did deliver.”

I don’t think I experienced a more perfect moment over the whole week. At that moment I would happily have hugged him, or prostrated myself before him. (Rest assured I resisted the temptation.)

At 2am my tent was still standing and reasonably dry.


Diary composed in Mocha

Wednesday

Nine days is quite a long time to spend listening to folk music, sleeping in a tent, and living on coffee and beer. Seasoned festival goers speak of the Wednesday Wall. So I decided to take it a little easy today, and started out at 930 with a lecture on Cecil Sharp followed by an 11.15 talk on Sydney Carter.

The first talk was called “Cecil Sharp - Saint or Sinner”. The conclusion, was (spoilers follow) “a bit of both”. There is a definite problem with English folk music being mediated through the mind of one Victorian gentleman’s idea of what folk music is supposed to be; but the specific accusations of cultural appropriation and exploitation of his sources are wide of the mark. He did record some songs from black people and some religious songs; he made friends with a a lot of his informants, stayed in contact with them and sent them generous presents. And “Aryan” didn’t means then what it does now.

Brian Peters knowledge and enthusiasm made what could have been a dry talk very engaging. He (Mr Peters) popped up again the Woodlands ballad session later in the day and sung all 100 verses of Child Ballad 56. Boy marries girl, other boy smuggles dead leper into girls bed, boy condemns girl to death, dwarf turns up and chops other boys legs off. Seriously. One of the absolute highlights of the week. Is there are technical word for that near chanting performance that traditional ballad singers do?

Sydney Carter once wrote a song about a lady folk singer who became an exotic dancer in Camden town. (“I used to play the fiddle / now I dance with a snake around my middle”). That one didn’t make it into the hymnbook. We start with John Ball and finish with Lord of the Dance and in the middle there is one I had entirely forgotten about a latter day innkeeper who will let baby Jesus in if he comes back “but we hope he isn’t black.” A lot of Carter’s songs were quite saucy; I knew he worked with Martin Carthy (who is the only person who can really make Lord of the Dance work) but was completely unaware he had had a long partnership with Donald (Flanders and) Swann. I didn’t think a lot of the early songs and poems stood up that well -- there was a sense of looking into a time capsule. I didn’t know he’d had the idea of the man who lives backwards before either Martin Amis or Alan Moore. The speakers are keen to play down Carter as an “official” Christian: he didn’t mind his songs being sung in church but was adamant they weren’t hymns; he thought the Church’s Christ was one more idol and that Jesus had been one of many manifestations of the eternal Dance. Well, maybe: but Lord of the Dance and a Bitter Was the Night and Friday Morning and Judas and Mary seem pretty steeped in mainstream theology to me. When I was growing up the Methodist Hymn book had a note in it explaining why Lord of the Dance was not too upbeat to sing in church.

Rachel (formerly of Bellowhead) Macshane is fabulous. Tune laden versions of mostly folk standards — Sylvia the female highwayman who nearly shoots her lover to find out if he’s a real man, the girl who shoves his sister in the river and a slightly less filthy Mole Catcher (by comparison with Nick Hart’s version). I love Martin Simpson to bits, and he was so lovely about the fact that so many people were turned away from the Roy Bailey show, and I will listen to him singing Never Any Good forever. His version of Carthy’s version of Rosselson’s Palaces of Gold is still chilling, and he has correctly redirected it at Grenfell Tower. (It was originally about Aberfan.) But I am starting to think that I have heard enough very fast very twiddly bluesy riffs about characters called One Eyed Bugsy McHarp.

Harri Endersby is, I fear, the kind of singer song writer who appeals hugely to people other than me. Granny’s Attic are sensational. I am reliably informed that Iona Fyfe is the best young Scottish female ballad singer on the circuit. She is very, very Scots, and I fear that by the time she took to the Kennaway Cellar stage, the Wednesday Wall had finally caught up with me....

Diary written in The Chattery

Tuesday

Some people are organised. Even in a tent. They bought their eco friendly reusable cup on the first day, and have carried it with them for the rest of the week. I am not one of those people. Each day I go to the bar and ask for a pint of beer, and each day have to pay an extra pound for a eco friendly reusable cup. I assume this is helping the planet in some way.

Today I ventured up the Big Hill for the first time. The campsite is a way out of town at a place called Bulverton, and at the top of a big hill is the Bulverton marquee, aka The Young Peoples Tent. The Ham in Town does sit down concerts with your Julie Fowlis’s and your Martin Simpsons, The Bulverton up the hill lets you stand and bop to your Seth Lakemens and Peatbog Fairies.

Worth the climb. At 7pm Sam Sweeney was doing an informal meet the artist Q and A, mainly aimed at the young people who had been doing workshops all day. I hadn’t realized how much of Sam’s fiddle style he owes to Chris Wood (indeed I am inclined to forget that Chris plays the fiddle as well as sings miserable songs.) A young woman asked him about building a repertoire. He told her to play through the book of 1000 English folk tunes (it exists) in the bathroom, and when she finds one she likes, play it over and over. And if you find you are playing it differently to the book, he said, that’s “wicked”. It means the song is still alive.

Broom Bezums started off in the big dancing hall around 8pm. I’d forgotten how good they were. I’d forgotten that “Keep Hauling On” is originally their song, and Fishermen’s Friends were covering the Show of Hands cover. I never thought to see a grown up audience having such fun with Man Gave Names To All The Animals. Proof if proof were needed that Bob never wrote a duff song.

They were followed onto the stage by Sam Kelly and the Lost Boys who become more superlative every time I hear them. I could probably face life without the pop covers (yes, Sultans of Swing, very droll) but there is an absolute core of proper folk here. The swirling experimental weave around the House Carpenter may not be quite Trad but it is responding to the actual plot of the actual ballad. (Girl marries carpenter; girl runs away to sea with previous lover; previous lover turns out to have cloven hooves and a tail, everyone goes to hell.) But folk doesn’t get much more folky than a whole hall full of people singing Jackie boy / Master / Sing You Well / Very Well / All amongst the trees so green oh together. (Steve Knightley incorporates the same traditional song into his first world war ballad about a game keeper. It’s the folk process, innit?)

The tribute to Roy Bailey was a bit overwhelming. Received wisdom says that if the queue outside the theater has gone passed the lamppost, the people at the back won’t get a seat. The queue had reached that point an hour and a half before the doors opened. (And then, naturally, it started to rain.) Roy was not a song writer but an interpreter of songs, so a tribute show is necessarily a compilation of everyone’s favourite socially themed songs. Martin Simpson (his son in law) sang What You Do With What You’ve Got. Nancy Kerr sang Everything Possible. Robb Johnson sang We Are Rosa’s Daughter’s. John Kirkpatrick sang, er, Arthur Askey’s Busy Bee. If you have never heard the best accordion player making his box go buzz where you like but don’t sting
me, you have missed out. Sandra Kerr said it wasn’t fair to make her follow that, and Martin suggested that she sang Why Did It Have To Be Me. Martin Carthy provided guitar, but rather alarmingly, didn’t sing. Martin Simpson told the story of Roy briefly becoming lucid in the hospice and singing the final verse of “there’s always enough for a war, but there never enough for the poor”. And then everyone sang Rolling Home. Nancy and James had to sing from a sheet because, well, none knows the verses: Roy always sang them.

pass the bottle round
let the toast go free (FREE TOAST!)
health to every labourer
wherever they may be
fair wages now or never
let’s reap what we have sown
as we go rolling home, as we go rolling home.

Dry eyes were in rather short supply

dIary written in Cornish Bakery

Monday

So. A knight rapes a poor maiden and sensibly tells her his real name so she can name the child after him. So she tells the king and the king says he has to marry her. Just to rub it in, she goes to the wedding dressed as a lady and he has to go dressed as a page. A young man asks his sister why she looks so poorly. Because I’m pregnant with your child, she says. So he kills her. A man gets two ladies pregnant, marries one and the other hangs herself. So he runs away to sea. But her ghost comes after him in a boat and drowns him.

Ballads are great. An old guy at Woodlands did the most perfect Patrick Spens I’ve ever heard, in perfect Scots. (Man sails to Nor A Way, Man sails back from Nor A Way. Everyone drowns.)

Nick Hart also sings ballads. Nick Hart’s ballads take no prisoners. Even he admits that his version of Two Sisters goes on a bit. There is Nick Hart, there is a guitar, and in the Kellaway Cellar there is sometimes Ben Moss) as in Moore, Moss and Rutter) on a fiddle. There has been a generation of folkies adding twiddly bits and guitars and synths to folk songs; now there is Nick Hart singing them, sometimes even with that folkie nasal twang. Nick Hart is the Anti-Jim. He’s the most exciting thing in traditional folk at the moment.

The cashpoints are working again. I celebrated with a cup of coffee. (Nick Hart recommended Buzz, the coffee stand in the craft field. They are indeed excellent.)

Sam Sweeney or Robb Johnson? Robb Johnson or Sam Sweeney? Sam Sweeney made my favourite album of last year, one of the few instrumental albums I would listen to voluntarily. Robb Johnson is a marxist primary school teacher who has been called the best songwriter after Richard Thomson and ought to be twice as famous. I opted for the songs, because I felt a whole two hours of fiddle playing might be challenging on a Monday afternoon. Judging by the empty seats at the Manor Pavillon everyone else chose the fiddle tunes.

Sidmouth has a dinky little theatre, complete with comedy and tragedy masks in gold over the proscenium arch. It’s the only proper rep theatre still running in the UK. Over the summer they are doing Present Laughter and The Kings Speech and Run for Your Wife. (“And the terrible thing” said Satan “is that this could be heaven for some poor sod.”)

Robb Johnson does a one man history of the 20th century, 1918-2018, through the eyes of his father, who was shot down in WWII. He as repurposed “i’m voting Jeremy Corbyn” as “Atlee for PM for me.” Johnson is a proper socialist who believes in workers control and assumes that we do as well. His lyrics can be incredibly subtle and powerful, as in a description of his Dad from the point of view of one of the kids in his class; but he knows how to do anthems as well. His celebration of the 70 goes “all you need is love, all you need is love, all you need is love. And comprehensive schools.”

I really can’t be doing with Gaelic, so I went back to the theatre for a programme of Dartmoor Entertainment. Lots of jolly accordions. Jim Causley doing that one about the tin mines. Step dancing. And a literal jig doll. But no rape or incest.

Diary written on a bench outside Sidmouth Public Library

Sunday

There are no cash points in Sidmouth!

At any rate none of the cash points are giving out money, and none of the shops are doing cash back. And most of the pie kiosks are cash only! Fortunately the bar at the Ham is happy with plastic.


I had forgotten that the best bit of the folk week is about 1030 at night after the big gig has finished, walking around the seaside streets following the sounds of diddly diddly dee and sea shanties into pubs which haven’t quite closed. There was a yeehar band singing Old Dan Tucker in the Duke on the sea front, and some guys sitting round a table in the Black Swan singing South Australia and Rock Me Mother Like A Southbound Train while another guy accompanied them on the hurdy gurdy. I had heard a couple of hurdy gurdy players busking no on the esplanade earlier in the day. And someone singing a Rock Me Mama co e to think of it. You can go for years without hearing a busker with a hurdy gurdy and then two come at once. The word “esplanade” makes me think of Jake Thackeray. To me the road by the beach is the promenade.

Oh yes, and I also heard my favorite act in the world singing my favorite song in the world. (“Terms and conditions apply.”’)

Steve Knightly (sans Phil and Miranda) called his show 50 Shades of Sidmouth. It was meant to be a retrospective on 50 years of coming to the festival. It started out in the vein of his 2017 solo show about his career, with stories about learning to play guitar by playing Dylan records at half speed and making the audience try to guess the lyrics of his first ever song. Before long he was bringing on friends from the old days . An old club singer gamely got through Paddy’s Sicknote. He was reunited with Paul Downs who played with him in his first band, Gawain. (They were big enough to open for Steeleye: I never knew that.) I felt that the Sidmouth narrative became a bit lost as the evening went on. His teenaged daughter helped him sing Let Me Feel Your Love, Edgelarks participated in The Keeper, and Sidmouth brass band came on for the last few numbers. Any show which ends with Cousin Jack on a brass band is fine with me me. Rather a jolly brass arrangement, I would have said, but very clever the way they worked the accompaniment in with Steve’s spoken improvised sections.

Instead of an encore, the entire company sang The Larks They Sang Melodians.

Auto correct wants me to change hurdy gurdy to hurry ghastly. Just saying.

Earlier in the day I went to a stripped down acoustic version of Merry Hell. Their acoustic version worked much better for me than their louder electrical version which I’ve heard before. Think Three Daft Monkeys with a bit of Oysterband and a bit even of Show of Hands. Come on England will probably annoy the same kinds of people who were annoyed by Roots. One of the reasons I relocated to the folk world is that it gives me a space to be patriotic without being, you know, patriotic.

So stand up, come on England, live up to your history
Your heart can't be held in a flag or a crown
Raise your teacups and glasses, you bold lads and lasses
And drink to the spirit that will never lie down

I asked a few years ago who was going to speak truth to power now Chumbawamba are gone. There was a moment where I thought Merry Hell were about to answer the question.

Best song of the day was Hannah Rarity doing an almost comprehensible Scots traditional number about an ugly witch who turns a man into a worm for saying so.


Diary written in Black Horse pub.

Saturday

NOTE:=You are almost certainly not the first person to have spotted that the word “folk” sounds a bit like the word “fuck”.

You all probably think I am mad. I passed on all the Big Venues again today (no one needs to hear the Spooky Men twice in a week) and hung mostly around the Woodlands Hotel. I have to remind myself that I bought a season ticket so I am free to choose what to go to, not to oblige me to go the most expensive ones. A blue plaque tells me that the Woodlands Hotel was a thatched medieval barn and then the home of one of Nelson’s captains. I think I listened to traditional music from 11.15 to 10.30. It’s a marathon, not a sprint and I won’t keep this up for a week, but I hate the idea of missing anything. Yesterday’s big hit Ragged Trousers we’re playing at every venue I went to. They did an astonishing things combining two versions of the Cruel Mother, but the ten minute introduction was probably as important at the song. . At the time the song was written, conceiving a child out of wedlock was a criminal offense and if a baby died there was a presumption that the mother had killed it. So a lot of women would have been burying babies near wells in forests and down by the greenwoods of ivy, oh. (I have probably heard the Flying Cloud as many times as I need to, though.)

I suppose I am search for the Great Folk Moment, that at some point in a pub someone unlikely will pick up a fiddle and sing the perfect Marty Groves and I don’t want to risk eating a pasty while it is happening.

The Woodlands hotel runs a two hour ballad session for all comers every evening, with a stern warning that only traditional songs are permitted. All the usual suspects appear — there will be a Bruton Town and a Fair Flower of Northumberland. The afternoon mini concert kicked off with a folk couple (Annie Winters and Paul Down, possibly) singing a song beginning “it is of two noble butchers” so I knew I was in the right place. I have heard stories in which a fair lady runs off with seven yellow gypsies, raggle taggle gypsies and someone called Black Jack Davey, but today the abductor was a dark eyed gypsy. The lady didn’t mind, as normal, and was quite looking forward to drinking the dew and eating the grass, which instantly set me thinking about whether gyspsys are stand ins for fairies. Almost certainly, now I think of it. Ballads are the heart of English music and these sessions are for me the heart of the festival. I wish i could hold a tune.

One of the formats for song hearing is called “an hour or so in the company of” which is pretty much what it sounds like, and informal session in which the singer can chat or play as the mood takes him. Today we had an hour or so in the company of Damien Barber and Tony Hall. Damien Barber is of course the brains behind the Demon Barbers dance group, but he’s getting back into solo performing. He said he’d asked for small venues but the Woodlands was packed. He ended the hour with Little Pot Stove. Tony Hall accompanied him on an ancient squeeze box. It just so happens that Tony Hall played that exact squeeze box with Nic Jones on Penguin Eggs.

As I say. Folk moments. You presumably think I am entirely mad.

Diary written at Wakey Wakey Eggs and Bakey.

Friday

Oh the English, the English sunbathing and playing cricket on a pebbly shingly beach taking surfboards out into a calm sparkling blue sea that never saw the slightest bit of surf making the most of the relatively hot weather on the grounds that it will probably be snowing by the end of the week.

People behind me on the bus try too start rousing chorus of The Wild Rover, but’s dispute develops between proponents of the Irish version (wild rover! wild rover!) and the English version (no,nay, never).

The bar at the Ham (the main in town sit down concert marquee) is woefully inadequate for 10000 folkies all wanting real ale in the 15 minute interval. I was impressed with the lady trying to catch the bar staffs eye through the power of natural justice (no, i have been waiting longer,i was in the back row so i should have been served first.) Also impressed with people complaining to the stewards because they didn’t arrange different weather.

Sidmouth Toyshop may have missed an important memo.

The second Pre Festival gig features one Ralph McTell who needs no introductions but still gets one. It is apparently the 50th anniversary of That Song. Someone tells me that it was originally written to persuade a drug addict friend to turn his life around. I hope this is true because some people have taken it to mean “middle class people have no right to be depressed”. Because of That Song’s middle brow ubiquity, it is easy to forget that Ralph McTell started out as a disciple of Woody Guthrie, and when he isn’t talking about early bluesmen (“the ghost of Robert Johnson) he is lauding Bob Dylan (“the Zimmerman blues”). Rather a lot of his songs are about other singers and other artists — I am not sure that extending the “girl on the New Jersy ferry” incident to a whole song says anything which Orson Wells hasn’t already said just as well. The older he get, the more Johnny Cash I hear in his delivery. No one song will ever be as famous as Streets of London, but he can produce endless jaw dropping lyrics. “Dylan and Rotolo in a freeze farm photograph. eternally tomorrow” “she had us kind of hypnotized she made us hold our breath but if you want to love your life you have to flirt with death”,

A folk fan:

Up and coming and slightly intimidated Kitty McFarlane opened for him. She gets better every time I hear her. She has added field recordings of birdsong and nature sounds to her enigmatic mediative songs. The incredibly convoluted migratory patterns of European eels suggests migration in a wider sense, becoming a “a very, very subtle protest song.” The last known proponent of the art of weaving sea silk (silk gathered from clams) becomes a metaphor for women’s agency “until the time I am undone I’ll spin saltwater into sun”.

Lady Maisery are always wonderful. However, I have heard them quite a lot, so on a whim I let them be wonderful without me and headed for the more intimate Kellaway Cellar space. This turned out to be a Good Choice : three super traditional acts who I wouldn’t otherwise have heard.

Alice Jones comes from Halifax and does heartfelt cheeky northern songs. We had “from Hull and Hell and Halifax good lord deliver me” of course, and one I hadn’t heard before about weavers which went to Hard Times of Old England (so sing success to the weavers. the weavers forever, huzzah!) She also has a nice line in that “body percussion” thing where you accompany a song by slapping yourself round the face.

Jeff Warner has been singing traditional American songs and telling banjo jokes since forever. He oscillates between singing and speaking the words, occasionally pulls out a jews harp s raises playing the spoons almost to the level of a juggling act. Do you know, I don’t think i’d ever heard All About The Renters on Penny’s Farm before? (It was lovingly ripped off by Bob for Hard Time in New York Town.) We got a Loggers Alphabet and a deeply silly version of the Farmers Cursed wife.

Ragged Trousers do shanties. And other robust masculine songs, including a rousingly ranty Riggs of the Time; and their own version of a Chartist anthem. (“Have you noticed that chartist anthems never actually mention constitutional reform? I suppose nothing rhymes with “election”.)But the highlight was the extended ballad about the chap who is born on fair Erin’s shore , decided to make his living selling slaves, falls in with the pirates and ends up with a one way ticket to tyburn. This is what we come to folk festivals to listen to. The band were o intensely interested in the backgrounds to their songs and their harmonies were robust enough to knock the socks off any Cornish beach. I’m off to hear them again as soon as I finish breakfast.



Diary written at Fort Cafe

Thursday

Sidmouth, please.
Single or return?
Single.
£7.10, unless you would like a daily rover.
No, I’m just going to Sidmouth
It’s just that the daily rover is £6..10.
Then what was the point in...

I recently came out as an introvert. Festivals are fabulous for introverts. I talked to a lady on the bus with jewelry all over her about social dancing, ceilidhs, and whether Molly Dancing is a thing, and a man n a Blackbeard’s Tea Party Teeshirt about Blackbeard’s Tea Party, but i don’t have to talk to anyone for a whole week.

My very lightweight very easy to assemble tent is very lightweight and very easy to assemble but turns into an oven when the sun is out. The sun is out, but I am not spending any time in the tent pin the hours of daylight.

The festival happens in pubs and marquees in the town, a regency seaside town that has something to do with dinosaurs. The campsite is out of town but there is an official shuttle. The official shuttle is part of the experience, how often have you been on a double deck bus full of Morris Dancers?

The music got off to a (rousing) (raucous) (up tempo) (not entirely folky) start with a standing ovation for Lindisfarne who I admit have up to now almost entirely passed me by. I know the very famous one, of course. (Does he really sing “i can have a wee-wee?”) They came across to me as somewhere between the Oysters and the modern Fairport. Very much the right kind of thing on the first day of festival, but actually I was more enamored of Miranda Sykes, who opened for the. Miranda is of course “the one with the double bass” in Show of Hands, and I remember not specially liking her in a duo with Rex Preston, but her solo act is a chain of well judged covers. We get Little Johnny England’s lament about, er, country life, and a wonderfully specific piece by the singers mother about the way Lincolnshire has change in two generations.

I may possibly have mentioned before that it isn’t a folk festival until a song has reduce Andrew to tears, but perhaps it was a bit unfair to choose Vin Garbutt’s “what’s the use of wings” as the second song on the week.

The headline in the local paper is, I swear, “Call for tougher sanctions on mobility scooters.”

Diary written in Browns Kitchen