The Fenland Gent

There are loads of things I like about the Cambridge Folk Festival:

I like how it turns my local (charming) municipal park into a weird community of tent dwellers with daft hats.
I like how suddenly, for 4 days, there’s a half decent record shop near my house.
I like it that my friends, family and neighbours all go – which means I can go on my own and pootle about and still be sociable(ish).
I like the food stalls, (I wish some of them were there all year – especially the Northfield Farm Burger Van)
And I quite like some of the music. I usually get very excited about 1 or 2 acts that I see there.

Brilliant Cambridge Folk Festival Buskers Hobo Jones

This year I got really excited about 7 acts which means it was the best of the 5 festivals I’ve been to (3.5 times better I think)

The 7 acts were:

1. The Unthanks

Best thing I’ve seen for a long while.

They have the most beautiful voices and sing the most beautiful harmonies in songs many of which have arrangements that are brooding and melancholic and sparse. Some of these songs are “trad. arr.” but the Unthanks’ music does not find validation in some ossified folk music tradition. If they remind me of anything they remind a tiny bit in some ways of Kate Bush or Syd Barrett or Nick Drake in that they are very English but in an “other worldly” way. But they manage this whilst singing songs, many of which, are explicitly about “worldly” subjects like domestic abuse or working conditions for C19th women miners.

Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch to say they are like a Ken Loach film that somehow ended up being directed by David Lynch but I reckon that’s sort of the area in which they operate.

All the best things have contradictions. This was the best thing. Doubt I’ll see or hear anything better this year

And they clog dance and it makes them smile whilst they do it.

(You can buy The Unthanks’ “CD Here’s The Tender Coming” from Amazon UK here and from Amazon USA here)

2. CW Stoneking

A geniune made up authentic 1920s Australian blues singer.

There are some things about folk music that I’m not overly fond of – the obsession with tradition, the obsession with authenticity and the fretting about identity. The Cambridge Folk Festival is not especially riddled with this stuff (though it’s definitely there – the song “Roots” by the Show of Hands always gets a big cheer).

CW Stoneking is an Australian blues singer who performs as if he really is living in the 1920s or 30s but it’s a particularly contrived view of the 20s and 30s. He does not seem to be worried that much about authenticity and tradition and instead he has made up a brilliantly convincing act. Which I prefer and I wrote a long rambling blog entry here which sort of explains why.

(You can buy CW Stoneking’s CD “Jungle Blues” from Amazon UK here and Amazon USA here)

3. Carolina Chocolate Drops

Brilliant fiddle and jug band

The Carolina Chocolate drops are an old style string and jug band who play traditional music from Carolina. They dress up in outfits from 100 years ago (a bit) and they put on a highly entertaining show and most importantly they managed to be serious about what they were doing without being overly precious. Amongst their highly infectious and entertaining interpretations of traditional music they do a cover version of Blu Cantrell’s R&B hit “Hit ‘em Up Style” which was fantastic (You can see them doing it here).

You can buy The Carolina Chocolate Drops CD “Genuine Negro Jig” from Amazon UK here and from Amazon USA here

4. Spiro

In a way this is the closest thing you are going to get to Kraftwerk at the Cambridge Volk Festival.

Each year I go to the Folk Festival I wonder if I will see some mad development such as the invention of some form of Post Folk, where the weird scratched out atonal and discordant rhythms of old field recordings are reworked to create a new avant garde that tries to force folk music to look forward and not backwards.

This innovation would cause fist fights in the beer tent.

Never happens.

Never will.

However there are some bands that whilst I’m listening to them do make me think of other non folk bands. So last year in a very good set by Lau there was one bit which, to me, was like a balloon of swelling sound (err.) that reminded me ever so slightly of My Bloody Valentine.

I saw Spiro by accident. I bought an ice cream and only stopped in Stage 2 to eat it and ended up staying because they were so good. In the festival programme they are described as being minimalist and dissonant. I’m not sure I would go that far but there was one bit that made me think of Kraftwerk
But with fiddles.
Sort of.
Ok that is a bit of a push
But there was a song called Binatone.

(You can buy Spiro’s CD ‘Lightbox” from Amazon UK here)

5. The Burns Unit

Awesome Canadian – Scot supergroup named after Notts. Forest hard-man Kenny Burns*.

I loved this lot – they play big grown up songs about broken relationships and drink problems and decay and their songs seem to swell and grow and are laden with gorgeous hooks. Their LP Side Show may well be a contender for my LP of the year.

Also they were also a laugh which is important if you are going to sing about drinking too much and splitting up.

* I’m going to keep pushing the “named after Kenny Burns” line irrespective of what anyone else says.

(You can buy The Burn’s Unit CD “Side Show” from Amazon UK here and from Amazon USA here)

6. Imelda May and Sharon Shannon.

Stop being polite. Be more like Gene Vincent.

Prior to Imelda May and Sharon Shannon taking to the stage there was a band that played an especially polished version of Western Swing. People really liked this other band and they went down well, and I certainly didn’t hate them but I did start a fantasy that the ghost of Gene Vincent would come on stage and limp and stomp all over this bands’ slightly too polite ways.

Anyway a little after this Imelda May and Sharon Shannon took to the stage

I like Sharon Shannon a lot and Imelda May live is fantastic and here together on the main stage I would hazard the claim that they really did rip things up a bit, especially when, quite weirdly, they did a cover version of a Gene Vincent song. The crowd was tending toward being euphoric and thanks to the ghost of Gene Vincent I was ahead of them.

Really Ace.

You can buy Sharon Shannon’s CD “Saints and Scoundrels” (which includes a duet with Imelda May) from Amazon UK here and from Amazon USA here

7. The Wonder Stuff

“I’m 44″ says Miles Hunt. The crowd cheers.

I have comfort music. My comfort music is not particularly mainstream or obvious and others may not find it comforting (It includes the Butthole Surfers, Celtic Frost, Minutemen, Barry Manilow and David Soul). But it is music I loved at some point and still listen to occasionally. Amongst my comfort music is the Wonder Stuff

In the very late 80s and early 90s I really liked the Wonder Stuff and so did most of my friends. We went to see them quite a bit when I was a student. I grew my hair long. I had a laugh at the gigs. I still think first 3 LPs are good – especially Never Loved Elvis (which I think was the first thing I bought in the CD format).

It seemed a bit unreal that this band from 20 years ago were playing in my local park. I’ve lost touch with most of friends from 20 years ago and half of the band’s original line up are dead – but this is still comfort music and I comforted myself during this gig by drunkenly singing along with almost every word of every song and by doing the stupidest jig of joy at the start of Ten Trenches Deep.

You can buy The Wonder Stuff’s CD “If The Beatles Had Read Hunter … The Singles” from Amazon UK here and from Amazon USA here

It was these 7 bands made this a memorable festival for me.

BUT

Also worth mentioning were Stornoway (earnest, young, clear voiced) Coco’s Children (lots of them, infectious) Breabach (folky, swirly) and Mama Rosin (up beat and very infectious). I missed most of Johnny Flynn because of a time table clash though I like what I saw.
By the time Kris Kristofferson took to the stage I think the fact that I done about 35 hours of festival band watching caught up with me. I missed the start and struggled to get into what was clearly a good set. Which was a shame because I doubt he’ll be playing in my local park any time again in the near future.

The Unthanks leaving the 2010 Cambridge Folk Festival

(All the pictures are thumbnails. I took the pictures).

At the 2010 Cambridge Folk Festival I was quite taken by C W Stoneking.

He got me thinking about how important “faking it” is in music.

C W Stoneking is a unique talent, a blues singer who acts and dresses as if it is the 1930s, but a 1930s that often owes more to Cecil B DeMille and Hollywood than it does to the lives of those Blues singers that lived in the Mississippi Delta. His act conjures up a world of South Seas’ tramp steamers or a world where men in shabby cream suits get stranded in shabby exotic hotels or lost in the jungle with only the rhythm of the drums for company.

In a way it’s barking mad but it is also great stuff.

I think the video for Jungle Blues which is from his second LP gives an indication of what he is up to.

(You can get his LP Jungle Blues from Amazon UK here)
(You can get his LP Jungle Blues from Amazon USA here)

At a folk festival is there are a lot of people who are very concerned with authenticity and tradition and preserving the old,

(...”and this is an old Yorkshire Dead Miner’s Dog Ballad called My Whippet Went A Courting…etc.”)

- but I’m of the opinion that tradition is mostly bunk and that curatorship is usually the enemy of imagination. I’m much more interested in the liars and the fakers – the people who take from the past, or from other people or “cultures” and pretend that that’s what they are. I like this because I reckon that a lot of the best, most inventive, most thrilling music in pop, rock and folk often began with someone pretending to be something they were not.

So whilst I’m at the festival watching, and thoroughly enjoying, CW Stoneking pretending to be something he is not – I began to think about Dylan.

There is footage of young English men and women being interviewed as they leave a Dylan concert during his “Judas” tour in 1966.
With a few exceptions these young men and women are cross at Dylan for playing his amplified electric music, they say that they had paid to hear folk music and this wasn’t what they had got – which is fair enough but there is one young women who is complaining that this electric Dylan is a fake.

Dylan was always a fake and in fact was brilliant because he was a fake.

When he “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival it was not the first time he’d reinvented – or made up – what he was. Earlier in the sixties he arrived in New York as a Jewish kid from the Midwest who had a fierce will not to be a Jewish kid from the Midwest. He wanted to be known as some sort of hobo ballader. He “made himself up” as a folk singer and did it in such an entertaining way that a large section of the public paid really close attention.

(Scorsese’s film about Dylan “No Direction Home” is about Dylan’s capacity for reinvention. It’s great. You can get it from Amazon UK here and Amazon USA here
Todd Haye’s film “I’m Not There” is a creative fiction about the many faces of Dylan. I liked it. You can get it from Amazon UK here and Amazon USA here).

So much of post war C20th pop and rock (and folk) was about pretending to be what you wanted to be which was usually the opposite of what you actually were.
You have to sift through an awful lot of sociological, cultural, historical, political and technological developments to get to the happenstance of why but maybe you can sort of pin it down to having something to do with:

War, America, Race, Invention, Youth, Sex and Electricity.

It was something to do with these things in the early sixties that led young men in this country, with those slightly dull post war names like Eric, Brian and Keith, to pick up guitars and learn to play them because they wanted to be like Delta blues men.

It takes an extraordinary leap of imagination to want to be like a Delta blues man if it’s the very early sixties and you are from Middlesex or Surrey and you’re still in a grammar school blazer. But that’s the point. These young men did make extraordinary leaps of imagination and as such their lives became quite brilliant adventures and they were able to take music and culture, popular or otherwise, in all sorts of new directions.

And it was not just them.

As well as Eric, Keith and Brian (and Dylan, who wanted to be Woody Guthrie), there was Elvis wanting to be either Faron Young or black. Iggy Pop didn’t want to be a nice kid from a decent suburb. Lou Reed didn’t want to be a nice kid from a decent suburb. Bowie wanted to be a mod, then a spokesman for youth, then a frock wearing Pre-Raphaelite beauty, then he wanted to be Iggy, then he wanted to be black, then German and then young. Blokes from council estates wanted to wear make up & dresses on Top of the Pops. Peter Gabriel wanted to be a wardrobe. Some young men in post war Germany wanted to be robots. Oiks wanted to be squires. Squires wanted to be oiks. Damon Alban wanted to be working class. Brett Anderson wanted to be gay and so on and so on.

There really are about a billion examples and most of them are usually about wanting to be a different class, race or sexuality and it has been a process that has produced so much work of real note*

In fact I think that this process of “making yourself up” in public and trying to be what you are not could be one the key strands in making C20th rock and pop what it was.

But what about Folk?

Folk played a huge part in this process, not least because of Dylan. The late 50s and early 60s folk revival was perhaps the template of a process that kept happening in the 60s and 70s and 80s, a process of imitation inspiring innovation; a process of copying leading to reinvention which in turn lead to something original.

Examples I’m especially fond of include original Dylan copyists the Byrds, who under the guidance of (millionaire cowpoke) Gram Parsons went “country” because country was “authentic”. Members of Fairport Convention (all from North London I think) saw the Byrds during this country phase and went off to do the same with trad. English folk and came back having invented Electric Folk. More recently Billy Bragg drew a seemingly absurd line from Woody Guthrie to south Essex and made it work so well and Shane MacGowan managed to place the 100 Club somewhere in Connemara . He was able to this because, like all those that were brilliant at this, his contrivance seemed, or perhaps even was, something natural and instinctive.

Unfortunately a lot of folk isn’t always comfortable with this conspicuous fakery – which is probably why those young folkies got cross with Dylan all those years ago. I think a consequence of this is a tendency for too much folk music that is revered by fans, and is presented in a polished and polite way by the performers and where innovation, when it does appear, stumbles about in a rather clumsy way (ooh look they’ve got a rapper).

Footnote

I just read this though before posting it an have realised that I’m talking almost exclusively about white musicians. I don’t think Billie Holiday, James Brown, Chuckle Berry, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Miles Davies, Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye etc had to fake a single thing to be brilliant.

*People who are from Kingston Upon Thames, or thereabouts, who pretend to be from Kingston Jamaica will always be annoying.

Usually a bit suspicious of how good a band really is if that band’s showstopper is a cover version – but the Carolina Chocolate Drops version of this song is just so so so good and whilst it was a showstopper at the 2010 Cambridge Folk Festival the rest of their stuff was also pretty amazing.

Really great band and really great to watch.

(This clip is not from the festival).
(Obviously).

Various photos of the bands I most enjoyed on the Saturday at the Cambridge Folk Festival – Unthanks, Spiro and the Carolina Chocolate Band (and some Morris Dancers – not a fan but I liked the photo).

The Unthanks were fantastic at The 2010 Cambridge Folk Festival (despite the people chatting away at the back). The highlight was them singing The Testimony Of Patience Kershaw but their dancing was also ace – as you can see here in this quite small picture which I think is a thumbnail for an equally small picture.

The lad that sings with Stornoway looks like a member of the pre WW1 officer class. He has a high, strong, boyish voice. I could imagine him singing The Eton Boating Song. If he could act, I’d cast him as the lead in a film about A War Poet.

I’m not sure about some of his rhymes. “Attic” with “Static” in The song Zorbing always makes me wince a bit.

But I like that song and 2 or 3 others. I like they seem a bit posh (not sure they are though). I like that they are very English.

Cocos Lovers were fine. They kept a big crowd in the club tent entertained and seemed to be entertaining themselves at the same time.

The top row of photos are of Cocos Lovers, the next row is Stornoway. They’re thumbnails. I cheated with the photos and mucked around with them to make the pictures look better because the originals were a bit tatty.

The links below are for Spotify were you can hear the debut LPs by the bands.

Cocos Lovers (Spotify)

Stornoway (Spotify)

1. Imelda May.

A fantastic performance.

Any women with an Irish accent like hers and with cheek bones like hers, dressed in an American retro get up and playing a bodhran is always going to turn my head. But I’d like to think that if Imelda May was a plump, plain girl from Stevenage in sportswear who played the bongos I’d be just as happy. (Maybe not the bongos – loathsome bloody things).

From where I was standing it was a (tent) roof lifting performance and the band seemed genuinely thrilled and surprised by the crowd’s reaction.

You can hear her LP on Spotify here

2. Mumford & Sons.

Opened the festival and were so good that I’ve bought tickets to go and see them at the Cambridge Junction in October. My new all time fave band. At the moment.

3. Lau

I think they’ve played at 3 of the 4 CFF festivals I’ve been to and they just get better each year. Their set on the main stage was a spine tingling affair and the version they did of The Burrian just kept swelling my euphoria until it nearly burst all over the sleeping twat lying in front of me.

At the time of my writing this you can see the performance of The Burrain at the BBC2 website here
Their new LP is at Spotify here

5. Booker T performing Green Onions

It was raining so hard that everyone just piled into the main tent for Booker T’s performance. Not me though because I had a great new anorak. I was outside – on my own and when he played Green Onions I was lost in a reverie, dancing like a loon.

At the time of writing you can find a video of Booker T’s performance here.

(I didn’t do the zip up properly on my anorak – so my reverie came at a price. £10 for a new, dry shirt from the hemp stall)

6. Northfield Farm Burger Van

..and there’s a review of that van here

7. Jim Moray

I’m not enough of a folkie to know whether this chap is the new saviour of British folk. He is pretty entertaining though and he even managed to blend rap with folk in a way that didn’t tip me over into an unholy rage. It was a bit disappointing to see him do pretty much the same set the next day on the 2nd stage and with pretty much the same anecdotes.

At the time of writing the Beeb have this video of his performance here.

8. Bad Shepherds.

Adrian Edmondson’s band are essentially a novelty act doing folk version of punk and post punk songs. However I think he has some very good musicians with him and as a result a lot of the music is good enough to listen to more than once, in particular their take on God Save the Queen.

9. Susan Tedeschi

Saw this pretty much by accident – but in a way that is typical of the CFF. Chatting to friends (outside the main tent) the music from the main stage kept grabbing my attention until I finally went to see who it was. Glad I did as it was great stuff. Since then I’ve been listening to her LPs on Spotify and I’m not quite so taken by those – but she is a fantastic live act.

You can listen to her latest LP on Spotify here.

10. Saw Doctors.

Saw Doctors are just a great live band and are not precious about entertaining the crowd. (Unlike Lucinda Williams who on the next night had a hissy fit about cameras). I prefer the Saw Doctors in smaller venues – but I’m sure I had an idiotic grin on my face for most of this gig.

The best things about festivals is when I am taken by a band without really knowing much about them.  This afternoon I listened to some of the artists on Spotify that were playing this evening at the festival – but with Mumford and Sons I had to listen to the four tracks they had posted on their Myspace page and I liked it enough to get down to the festival early as they were the opening act. Smart move on my part because they were quite excellent.

The thing I liked most was the force of the songs, harmonies were almost hollered out and the lead singer has a brilliant aggressive bite in his voice which when combined with the heads down driving rhythms was just the biggest thrill.

I always feel a bit of a twat when I write about music I like; tend to use too many adjectives and superlatives – but they really were brilliant and I am kind of hoping that the festival throws up a few more moments like that.

(The photo was not from the gig – my Iphone camera is garbage so this is from Flikr)