Arts Diary
Theatre Catch-Up: Macbeth; Vanya; The Glass Menagerie; Truth's a Dog Which Must To Kennel, Hamilton
I hereby declare myself "bankrupt" in the sense of having seen too many shows and not written reviews of them and therefore being unlikely to catch up.
For the record:
Ralph Fiennes' Macbeth (streaming at Everyman) reminded me what a very good play Macbeth is. I think too many producers get high on the fact that they are doing M*a*c*b*e*t*h and focus excessively on the imagery, particularly around the Scottishness and Witchines, during which some necessary question of the play is apt to be considered. (Denzil Washington's version was full of ideas and almost impossible to stay awake through.) I felt the focus here was where it ought to be, on Macbeth himself. Fiennes was almost whimsically mad at times; like an Act 2 Hamlet or one of the many Fools; as if Macbeth was a proto-Lear, losing his kingdom and his family and his sanity as he unravels in the long penultimate scene (Act 5 scene v.) Neither me nor Sofa-buddy felt that the production solved any of the plays central problems; but it treated it as historical and political drama, not as a repository of iconic moments.
Andrew Scott's one-man Vanya (also at Everyman) was very much a tour-de-force: the idea that one actor, however could, could take on all eight roles in an already confusing Russian psychological drama is clearly barking mad. Dr Johnson would have probably said that even if it was not done well, it was amazing that it was done at all. (I understand that Eddie Izzard is currently giving Hamlet the same treatment.) But Vanya is done very well indeed. The action, or at any rate the accents, have shifted to Ireland, which makes perfect sense. Scott uses some slightly contrived mannerisms to keep the characters separate (Dr Michael has a habit of bouncing a tennis ball while he talks) and people keep saying each others names. He doesn't feel the need to leap around the stage: he is happy to change voices in the middle of the most intense dialogue. I think that if you didn't know the play you might lose track of who was related to who and how it all fitted together; but would still feel the emotional power of the individual scenes and grasp the over all sense of the piece. The tragi-comic denouement -- in which Chekov's Gun turns out not to be loaded -- takes on an additional level of irony when there is only one person on the stage. We can't instantly see what has happened, so we're likely to assume that Vanya has really killed Alexander -- until Scott flips back into Vanya's persona and says "I've missed!" I'd like to rewatch the full cast Toby Jones version that came out in lockdown and then watch this again. The script is condensed, of course -- it runs to about 90 minutes where the full play doesn't come in much under three hours, but it doesn't feel over-rushed: this is definitely Chekov, not the Reduced Chekov company.
The Glass Menagerie (Bath Theatre Royal) is weird and brilliant. One knows what to expect from Tennessee Williams: naturalistic deep South rooms, thick accents, smothering heat. This production embraced Williams meta-textuality. There is no actual scenery, although the stage is dominated by the PARADISE neon sign briefly mentioned in Act 2. It's the sort of production where actors are allowed to deliver lines directly to the audience rather than to each other. It's an empty stage, with Laura's collection of glass ornaments placed in a circle on the edge. (In the second half, artificial flowers and tea-lights are added.) The text draws attention to its artifice: it begins, you recall, with Tom introducing himself, explaining that he is both a character and the narrator, and pointing out that Jim is more realistic than the rest of the cast but also serves a symbolic purpose. The stage directions indicate that the cast should mime eating without plates or knives and forks; so largely eliminating the furniture and going for a sort of abstraction works well. You can't exactly change the setting: it's too specifically about Southern Belles, gentlemen callers, the depression, the receding memory of the Civil War; but Laura keeps retreating into headphones and a walkman, rather than the old fashioned gramophone in the script. Williams' own sister was diagnosed with schizophrenia; but here Laura is clearly coded as neurodiverse. Her chat about her glass animals as if they were alive is witty and creative, rather than crazy. The scene in which Jim tries to bring her out of herself by teaching her some dance moves is played twice: once as a romantic musical-comedy number, and again as a realistic, awkward fumble. In the final moments of the play, Natalie Kimmerling (Laura) and (Kasper Hilton-Hille ) both seem to be in tears, which, a fortnight into the run, is quite impressive and alarming. The older I get the more I think Legitimate Theatre and this was an exciting take on one of the best examples of it.
Truths a Dog and Must to Kennel (Tobacco Factory) is a one man show by Tim Crouch. This is one to place alongside the Jumping Jews of Jerusalem: it was all right, but I don't think I really understood it. Crouch gave a fascinating post-show talk, and I slightly wish I could have heard it. before the show. You will recall that King Lear's fool disappears from the play after the scene in cottage on the heath; and his death is reported in the final seconds. The conceit of Crouch's piece is that the character is able to observe, through a set of VR goggles, what happens in the story after he leaves it. He describes the blinding of Gloucester, the Dover Cliff scene, and the final denouement as if they are real events. He also looks out into the auditorium -- of a huge, traditional theatre, not the tiny Tobacco factory studio -- observing members of the audience: the corporate boxes; the private school party; the man who had too large a pre-show dinner. He periodically takes off the helmet and performs stand-up. ("They say you play the Tobacco Factory twice: once on the way up, once on the way down. It's good to be back.") The voice is contemporary -- not that of Shakespeare's "marry-nuncle" jester -- but is suggestive of the Fool's knowing wisdom. One sees a lot of the points that are being made. The VR metaphor creates multiple worlds: a real audience watching a real actor create a fictional audience watching a fictional play. I agree with him that Dover Cliff is the whole crux of Lear: a madman leading a blind man into an abyss which isn't there. I grok that Edgar creates a "virtual" cliff for his blind father with his words; and the VR motif adds an additional Chinese box to the metaphor. During the blinding scene, a member of the imaginary audience -- the man who had too much dinner -- has a heart attack, and has to be carried out. He is pronounced dead by the paramedics just as Lear is trying to detect Cordelia's breath. All this in the actor's description of what the Fool is seeing through the headset. Ironically, two members of the real audience walked out half way through. (Years ago, I saw Anthony and Cleopatra on that very stage, and the show had to be briefly halted while a member of the audience was taken seriously ill. The actors went back to the beginning of the scene and continued as if nothing had happened. It increased my respect for the skills of the acting profession; and if anything, reinforced the theatrical illusion.) Crouch talks about the nature of theatre; about the lock-down era when actors were trying to use YouTube and Zoom to do shows; and how that can't substitute for the intimacy of a small number of people in a small room. He thinks that actors should not over-interpret texts but allow the audience to become complicit in the creation of meaning. (Even as the stand-up, he doesn't over-sell the jokes.) He uses Peter Hall-ish language about plays occurring in the space between the stage and the auditorium.
All of which is very true and very interesting, but I couldn't quite feel it. I would like to see the play again and would certainly watch any other work he brings to Bristol.
At one point the stand-up persona performs what is legendarily the filthiest joke in the repertoire, without actually saying any bad words. "And he puts his, you know, in her, you know, all the while the dog is sucking her, you know, and then he shows the audience his, you know." "And what do you call this act?" "The Royal Family."
Hamilton is very good indeed, but you knew that already.
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Sidmouth Folk Festival 2023
THURSDAY
Sidmouth is particularly well endowed with shops that sell everything. In preparation for a week in a field, I nipped into the towel, mallet, toothbrush, umbrella and saucepan shop and bought all the things I had failed to pack. I noticed that it also sold camp chairs and indeed tents. I was relieved about the latter, as the Bulverton camping field is alarmingly windy, and during set up my tent did a pretty fair impersonation of a paraglider. I still recall the year when the entire tent disappeared on the final night, shortly after Granny’s Attic had blown away in a hurricane. (They have since been recovered, I believe Cohen is performing with Reg Meuross this week.) The tent survived the night perfectly well but now I have a hammer I have hammered in the tent pegs, whoah oh oh all over this land.
The man in the pastie shop asked what kind of pasty I wanted, and I replied “one exactly like my Aunty Molly used to make.” But there were only traditional ones left. The coffee was excellent.
Of course I don’t really say any of these witty things, but I totally think them, sometimes as little as five minutes afterwards.
I am not saying I dress distinctively but the people in the adjacent tent said “ah yes, you are that pirate” and the people in the very nice bakery I haven’t been in for a year said "welcome back" and asked if I wanted the usual.
I would not wish to give the impression that Sidmouth consists entirely of coffee, pasties, bacon sandwiches and almond croissants. Since arriving twenty hours ago I have also had some beer.
Fishermen’s Friends did the same thing they did last year, and I thought the same thing about it that I did last year. You can insert a quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance if you want to. (I have never seen the Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance.) The audience were utterly ecstatic.
A lady on the bus from Exeter had the loudest voice I have ever encountered. She once bumped into a man who turned out to be related to the janitor at her old boarding school what are the chances of that, but in her favour she sometimes buys pasties for the homeless man on the beach.
Sidmouth is particularly well endowed with shops that sell everything. In preparation for a week in a field, I nipped into the towel, mallet, toothbrush, umbrella and saucepan shop and bought all the things I had failed to pack. I noticed that it also sold camp chairs and indeed tents. I was relieved about the latter, as the Bulverton camping field is alarmingly windy, and during set up my tent did a pretty fair impersonation of a paraglider. I still recall the year when the entire tent disappeared on the final night, shortly after Granny’s Attic had blown away in a hurricane. (They have since been recovered, I believe Cohen is performing with Reg Meuross this week.) The tent survived the night perfectly well but now I have a hammer I have hammered in the tent pegs, whoah oh oh all over this land.
The man in the pastie shop asked what kind of pasty I wanted, and I replied “one exactly like my Aunty Molly used to make.” But there were only traditional ones left. The coffee was excellent.
Of course I don’t really say any of these witty things, but I totally think them, sometimes as little as five minutes afterwards.
I am not saying I dress distinctively but the people in the adjacent tent said “ah yes, you are that pirate” and the people in the very nice bakery I haven’t been in for a year said "welcome back" and asked if I wanted the usual.
I would not wish to give the impression that Sidmouth consists entirely of coffee, pasties, bacon sandwiches and almond croissants. Since arriving twenty hours ago I have also had some beer.
Fishermen’s Friends did the same thing they did last year, and I thought the same thing about it that I did last year. You can insert a quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance if you want to. (I have never seen the Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance.) The audience were utterly ecstatic.
A lady on the bus from Exeter had the loudest voice I have ever encountered. She once bumped into a man who turned out to be related to the janitor at her old boarding school what are the chances of that, but in her favour she sometimes buys pasties for the homeless man on the beach.
FRIDAY
Midnight. Young people in the Town Square, setting up a karaoke machine and singing “Take Me Home Country Road To The Place I Belong”.
If you want to know why Sidmouth is the best festival in the world that's why. I don't know if the youths had anything to do with the festival. For all I know they may have impromptu alfresco karaoke every night or every weekend. It’s still what makes Sidmouth the best festival in the world. I forget which of the Communist literary critics who I was supposed to read at college talked about Carnival as a time when normal beliefs and systems are turned backwards, but quite clearly Sidmouth Folk Week should be called Sidmouth Folk Carnival.
I arrived in the Swan (a pub) after the evening gig and a complete stranger came up to me and congratulated me on my clothes. For the first 45 years of my life. I assumed that if anyone commented on my clothes they were taking the piss out of me. Because usually they were. But nowadays it’s seems they are mostly being kind. So we talked about folk music. I don’t specially like folk music he said, as a newbie what should I listen to? I said Jim Moray off the top of my head. He said he likef sea shanties. I said I liked sea shanties. He asked what my favourites sea shanty was and I butchered a verse of Barracks Privateers. Then the Morris dancers in the other bar statutes singing Ben Kenobi-nobi Too Ray Eh and I went and talked to them and we bonded over Les Barker. They hadn’t heard the last verse, so I shared it with them.
Who's not with us any more
Ben Kenobi-nob too-ri-ay
Cos he got killed in episode four
Ben Kenobi-nobi-too-ri-ay
Then I went to the Bulverton which is the all night marquee by the camp site. There were Morris dancers actually Morris dancing and some people doing a square dance, (pronounced 'ceilidh') and a campfire session with an actual campfire.
There is a local beer called Darkness which is a good name for a stout. I had already had two porters in the Swan so I just wanted a small one. I pointed out to the bar staff that "half of Darkness" is the novel by Joseph Conrad on which Apocalypse Now is based.
I have a horrible feeling I actually did.
There must have been some gigs as well? Does it date me terribly to say that hearing Barbara Dickson singing Another Suitcase In Another Hall makes me anticipate a sketch about a man who wants to buy four candles? She has an astonishing voice and an eclectic repertoire. She sang The Times They Are A Changing and a Christian Viking hymn (“hear me smith of the heavens”) and an out-there dark reworking of Young Willie Has Drowned In the Yarrow. Everyone went nuts for the one from Blood Brothers. I have never seen Blood Brothers but they have probably never seen the Two Ronnies.
In the evening I had an interesting chat with a nice Australian lady who does a community radio folk show and had really wanted to hear Kathryn Tickell, who was actually in the the other tent. (I recommended Luke Jackson and Gaz Brookfield and Chris Wood for her show.)
The first act in the tent we were were actually in was a young woman called Lizzie Hardingham who sang an unexpected Calyspo tinged Rolling Down to Old Maui. The second act were a band called Banter who did electric reverb twinkly takes on mostly classic folk songs. They did Some Time I Do Reap And Some Times I Do Sow with all the verses. They did quite a dark version of the Mermaid ("and we jolly sailor lads are climbing up aloft"), and a Golden Vanity in which the cabin boy turns round and sinks his own ship as well, which is something it has often occurred to me he ought to do. In the lowlands low, obviously. I kept thinking they sounded undefinably like Home Service, and then they mentioned that John Tams is one of their heroes.
Having had too much porter and stout it now occurs to me that there is talk about Cecil Sharp (the man with the house) that I really want to listen to at nine o clock tomorrow.
SATURDAY
It was in another life time, one of toil and blood.
9.30
Talk about Cecil Sharp by man who is writing new biography. Astonishingly there has only ever been one other full biography. This man's book aimed to cover his whole life: he believed in “progressive” education and was a Fabian, which doesn’t fit in so well with the image of a dotty victorian in a hat. There was a slightly defensive tone to some of the talk. He couldn’t have been a misogynist because he worked with eminent women. I learned a lot. I will read the book.
When blackness was a virtue the world was full of mud.
11:30
Randomly go to Small Stage where the programme says there are two acts singing folk songs. Turned out to be a very good call.
Jennie Higgins does excellent takes on trad songs, emphasising ones where women have some agency. Ben and Dom are two guys who obviously like the Young Uns a great deal, doing close harmony mostly self written songs, on Subjects, like friendship and how it’s okay not to be okay. Consistently good and with a nice self effacing stage presence, especially when Dom or possibly Ben opened the act by saying how pleased he was to be in Cambridge.
I came in from the wilderness a creature void of form
3:00
We have moved on from the year when acts said it is wonderful to be performing in front of a live audience again, and are now into the era when During The Pandemic is a formative life event. Riley Bungus, the highlight of the week so far, plays old time claw hammer banjo and refers to covid as “the great unpleasantness” which he distinguishes from “the other great unpleasantness” who is standing for re-election in his home country. He plays a wonderfully raw American mountains church song, definitely the only hymn I have ever heard which specifically name checks Hezekiah, and then makes us sing Amazing Grace church style. I have got to Day Two without using the phrase “drips authenticity”.
5.30ish
Ballad session in Woodlands Hotel, during which a young man rapes his sister and sets off in a bottomless boat; another man shoots his true love in mistake for a swan; several youths are interrogated about blood on their shirtsleeves; and someone else gets entangled in a prickle holly bush. These sessions are kind of the best thing at the festival.
7.00
The Bulverton marquee is at the top of the hill. A fellow inmate of the Bristol Sea Shanty sessions recognises my hat, and we talk about folk for the evening. He joins in the kailley (pronounced "sellidar") with some enthusiasm but I decline. There are limits. Dances are now gender neutral and there was a guy dancing impressively in a wheelchair.
Good Habits do their dotty skilful funny up tempo klezmerish thing; they’ve made their encore audience participation, with one half us singing Those Were The Days and the other half singing I Will Survive.
Blackbeards Tea Party are loud. There is a man in the audience with a beard, sunglasses and a tricorn, exactly like the logo. Stuart makes the audience shout “festival” every time he says “folk” and also "Macintyre" when the Old Dun Cow burns down. The new band members fit right in, and if anything, the theatricality has been dialled up a notch. Their arrangement of Jim Jones, the first folk song I ever loved, finally seems to have clicked for me. The sound engineer means you can hear every word of Stuart's vocal. There are flowing bowls, chickens on rafts, rollicking randy dandies and pig tailed sailors hanging on behind us. I may have mentioned that they are loud. But it never stops being folk music. They are basically the best thing there is,
Antoni arrived in the middle of the night. A tree fell down blocking entrance to the Bulverton for cars. My tent went full Chumbawamba in the 20 mph gusts, and a forecast suggested it was going all the way up to 50. I decided the best advice was to dismantle it, since broken tent poles are not what we need on the second night. I did not plan to leave Blackbeard at midnight, having possibly encountered Darkness My Old Friend again and spend forty five minutes putting my tent back together but needs must when the devil etc etc.
Failed to take into account that removing tent pegs in the dark was easier than finding them again in the dark, but people in next tent have lent me some of theirs. Remind me to buy them some Fudge. Someone else had offered me a sofa in their Air BnB if it came to it.
Come in she said, I'll give you, shelter from the storm.
It really is a very friendly carnival
SUNDAY
I had forgotten what the C stands for in YMCA, I suppose, and thought that the man who wanted to ask me some questions was trying to find out what my favourite Village People record was.
He actually wanted to give me his "testimony. I doubt that it was exactly like as if Jesus had been standing right next to him, but I shall not press the point.
I have since thought up several clever answers to his question. “If you could ask God one question, what would it be?”
“How do you feel about your followers pretending they are doing questionnaires when they really want to give strangers their Testimony?” might be one possibility.
In fairness, it was Sunday.
There has already been a certain amount of hymn singing in the Ham in the form of a rather clever show about Ralph Vaughan Williams. A choir sang some of the folk songs which Vaughan Williams collected and an instrumental group did a kind of improvisation around them and then the audience were invited to sing the hymns which he appropriated the tunes for. “I heard the voice of Jesus say come unto me and rest” is based on a song called The Red Barn Murder, which has the same tune as Dives and Lazarus. (It came full circle when one of the hobo singers, maybe even Joe Hill, turned the hymn into I Heard the Voice of a Pork Chop Say Come Unto Me An Eat.) I don't think I knew that “He who would valiant be 'gainst all disaster” is one of Williams’s. It is everyone’s favourite hymn at school, although I preferred the original version with hobgoblins and foul fiends. But I am damned if I can see how it is the same tune as Our Captain Calls All Hands. I can see that you sing the one to the tune of the other if you so desired. You don’t think Ralph was making up tunes and attributing them to Trad, do you?
Due to last night's incident with a tent, a storm and a lot of dark stouts, I may not have given the recital by a very eminent and excellent traditional Irish band, the Mcarthy Family the attention it undoubtedly deserved. What made this worse is that Sandra Kerr (!!!Madeleine the Rag Doll!!!) was sitting next to me. If she noticed me dropping off I would of course have to shoot myself.
And then it was time for Show of Hands. The queue stretched all round around the marquee back to where it started, but the steward pointed me to a single vacant seat for one person at the very front. I kicked over the person next to me’s drink, but they were very nice about it. (I bought them another one.)
Show of Hand did a pretty standard Show of Hands pretty much covering the greatest hits, which makes sense because they are going to stop touring for the foreseeable future. (I could not help noticing that Phil had to sit down to play his fiddle.) And they pretty much did them straight. Steve has been doing slightly experimental versions in his solo shows but there was none of that tonight, although the man with the beard and the hat from Track Dogs assisted on the Cajon. We all joined in with Country Life and Cousin Jack and Galway Farmer and ....everything else.
I bumped into Olivia from the Brizzle Shanty session in the Bedford Bar.
Steve Knightley is standing there, I said, but it would be too sad to go over and tell him how much his music means to me.
Of course you should, she said, he’s a performer and he will be pleased.
So I did.
I don’t want to come across as a drunk fan, I said, but your music is very special to me and it’s the main reason I got into folk music.
I told him the story of hearing Roots on Folkwaves on St George’s day and realising that folk music was where I wanted to be.
He was of course entirely charming. He said he remembered the episode and apologised for not playing Roots in the concert.
It occurs to me that I had effectively just given my Testimony.
What was it Bob said about it God and Woody Guthrie?
MONDAY
12ish
John Tams, that John Tams in the big tent. Yes, he did sing Over The Hills And Far Away. Yes, he did sing When We Go Rolling Home. Yes, we did all shout out Free Toast. Yes, your blogger did find that he had something in his eye, in a very gruff manly way. He was joined by the English Fiddle Ensemble, who are four English people who play fiddles, all together. One of their tunes went dum de da da, dum de da da, tra la la la la. Another one went tiddly tiddly tiddly, la la la, tiddly tiddly tom.
3ish.
Harp and Monkey did a programme of songs themed around the Victorians. Some original and some original. I have heard the story of Bendigo the Boxer in another song, but never knew he became a methodist preacher. When he was heckled by a previous opponent he came down from the pulpit and punched them. I enjoyed the one about all the people who lived in a long terraced road in Manchester, which may have inspired a long running soap opera.
5 ish:
Standing room only for a talk on the history of Morris dancing. As you would expect. I now know a lot more than I did before. It is definitely not a pagan fertility rite and definitely not a war dance and blackface only came in a a result of American Minstrels. In the English Civil War it became a symbol of the royalists, so Cromwell suppressed it pretty throughly, and there was a big revival after the Restoration. The side Cecil Sharp saw had been founded by a revivalist only nine months earlier. My feet were sore by the end of the talk.
8ish:
Last night I had my annual half a glass of cider to make sure I still don’t like it. In the same spirit I went to hear the Unthanks on the big stage. It’s an odd act: the sisters singing is understated, ethereal...I am definitely not going to use the word fey....but on occasions like this they have an eleven piece band behind them, with drums and brass and a grand piano airlifted in specially. Some of it works. The Copper family standard Thousand Or More / Sorrows Away mashed-up with a sea shanty, with endless repeats and audience participation is great. One For Sorrow, reworked so it is about crows, I believe for a TV show about a scarecrow, is excellent and atmospheric. But sometimes it doesn’t. I really don’t think that layered, produced, theatrical arrangement does King of Rome any favours. The overall sense is of a smoother, less raucous and less improvisational Bellowhead. I enjoyed the show but felt I was watching it at arms length.
I still don’t like cider.
TUESDAY
Undoubtedly the entire highlight of the festival so far was a man in a yellow and red striped waistcoat and hat singing The Rochester Recruiting Sergeant slightly off key upstairs in the Anchor Bar.
There are rumours that he may bellow Tom Pearse’s Old Mare later in the week.
The Anchor Bar isn’t quite part of the festival, but a singing group does an open sing around most days. There is a genre of comedy song, possibly northern, possibly music hall inspired that only surface at these events. And also Streets of London.
Someone sang A Miners Life is Like a Sailor, and many clenched fists were raised. An old man sang a funny song about how They control they media and academia and how germ theory and global warming is possibly a scam and everyone is forced to think the same way. An old Quaker lady said a few words about war (she was against it) and read out a short poem by Kipling.
I don’t know what this said about the Left Wing or Right Wing qualities of folk music.
Having been excessively snarky about the YMCA man asking silly questions yesterday, I ought to mention that the group of church ladies singing Shine, Jesus Shine in the busking spot in town with actual tambourines were rather adorable. And the product of a sensible “how can we use folk week for outreach” meeting, I shouldn’t wonder.
Clearly it is better to be patronising than snarky.
Also went to a sing-around in one of the sea front hotels. It fell out as a day to go to the smaller events. Someone did a very good job with Stan Rogers White Squall. Someone else did the parody (I cannot remember if it is Kipper or Barker) in which the story of the Three Bears is set to the old Yorkshire tune about the lady with the impotent husband. The room was quite large and not everyone can hear the words, so charmingly, one half was singing “My husbands got no courage in him” and the other half were singing “My husbands got no porridge in him.”
George Samson (Granny’s Attic) and Matt Quinn (Dovetail Trio et al) are a post lockdown duo, and it is an inspired pairing. The most interesting thing happening in the world of Trad. I mean, it isn’t everyone who would name an album after a fairly obscure ballad called Sheffield Park. They did a chat with John Wilkes (old songs podcast) in the morning and opened for Eliza in the afternoon,
Eliza on absolute top form. (Her dad was two rows in front of me.). I don’t like every configuration she appears in, but this Trio is is on exactly the right side of the Folk/Not Folk line. Specially love Valiant Turpin. Highwaymen are basically land pirates after all.
Decided Salt-lines, while doubtless edifying, would have had Too Many Notes so went to the Traditional Night Out at the Arts Center, at which a number of trad adjacent performers take it in turns to do their thing. A round robin gig, some people call it. An Irish academic told a long story about a fairy horse. He thinks he has evidence that silent film star Mary Pickford was an Irish story teller and this was one of hers. Sandra Kerr did a charming lullaby she wrote for Nancy. The aforementioned George and Matt did one of those eight minute, hundred and twenty verse ballads. (It stared off like the one about the Knight who hath drowned seven fair ladies here, but then went off in its own direction.) Hardly anyone else could have carried it off.
Despite several valiant attempts the nice pirate (Jamie) I met at the Blackbeards Tea Party gig failed to get a chorus of The Rattling Bog The Bog Down In the Valley Oh going in the Bedford afterwards, but the session people were singing County Road, along with much diddling and some deeing.
My trademark Superman shoulder bag has disintegrated.
I am sitting on a bench by the sea front. A choir is singing Ghost Riders In the Sky. There are seagulls. The scene could hardly be more English.
WEDNESDAY
The Bellowhead reunion literally no-one wanted. We are a little overwhelmed.
The day started with the aforementioned John Wilks doing an “in conversation” with the aforementioned Martin Carthy. John said it takes three times as long to walk through Sidmouth with Martin because people keep stopping him in the street to say how much they love his work. To which your blogger can only say “guilty”.Wilks is a stunningly good interviewer: he lets Martin chat around his huge range of stories, just occasionally jumping in and saying “What year would this have been?” or “Could I bring you back to Bob Dylan.”
Best moment: Martin Carthy remained, and remains, friends with Dylan. He would sometimes be invited to Bob’s hotel room during tours. So he met whichever celebrities Dylan was hanging out with.
“Can you think of any examples?”
“Well, John and Paul…”
He has forgiven Paul Simon (“the trudge through the grudge”) but now sings a different version of Scarborough Fair. Asked to comment on Eliza’s band, he whirls off on how much great folk there is in the world. He refers to a London group called Goblin Folk who no one has heard of as doing for English folk what Lankum did for Irish. And also mentions Granny’s Attic. Cohen Braithwait-Kilcoyne is in the audience.
Martin is in the audience for the extended tribute to Paul Sartin. The MC is story teller Matthew Crampton. He mentions that Paul had wanted to do a duo with the veteran so it could call it Sartin/Carthy. Carthy would have been up for it. It is one thing to go to a tribute for someone like Norma Watterson or Roy Bailey who have died at an an advanced age after illustrious career: but Paul died suddenly a few weeks after lasy year's festival, and this is very hard to treat as a celebration. Paul Hutchinson did a tune with Sam Sweeney. Matthew Crampton did a very creditable coverage of "My Cockadoodledoo" (it's a very fine cock, it's all I've got) which Paul often sang at Bellowhead after-show parties. Paul's sons, Joe and Will who are now a folk duo in their own right, did a set. And then Saul Rose and Benji Kirkpatrick (the two surviving members of Faustus) asked Joe back onto the stage to do his dad's part in I Am A Brisk Lad, and it completely broke me.
Joe came back onto the stage along with Benji, Paul, John Spires, Sam Sweeney, Pete Flood and other representatives of Bellowhead to sing London Town, which I think was a Paul Sartin arrangement. Such a funny, happy song. So many Bellowhead gigs. The audience dancing.
I am almost inclined to say that it was "too soon" to do this kind of tribute. For the finale they brought one of Paul's many folk choirs onto the stage, along with other members of his family and folkies who he'd work with (which is basically all of them) to do If I Were a Blackbird. It was clear that some of the performers weren't coping at all.
In the evening I head an Scottish folk punk band called Peat and Diesel. They did exactly what you would expect them to do.
Midnight. Young people in the Town Square, setting up a karaoke machine and singing “Take Me Home Country Road To The Place I Belong”.
If you want to know why Sidmouth is the best festival in the world that's why. I don't know if the youths had anything to do with the festival. For all I know they may have impromptu alfresco karaoke every night or every weekend. It’s still what makes Sidmouth the best festival in the world. I forget which of the Communist literary critics who I was supposed to read at college talked about Carnival as a time when normal beliefs and systems are turned backwards, but quite clearly Sidmouth Folk Week should be called Sidmouth Folk Carnival.
I arrived in the Swan (a pub) after the evening gig and a complete stranger came up to me and congratulated me on my clothes. For the first 45 years of my life. I assumed that if anyone commented on my clothes they were taking the piss out of me. Because usually they were. But nowadays it’s seems they are mostly being kind. So we talked about folk music. I don’t specially like folk music he said, as a newbie what should I listen to? I said Jim Moray off the top of my head. He said he likef sea shanties. I said I liked sea shanties. He asked what my favourites sea shanty was and I butchered a verse of Barracks Privateers. Then the Morris dancers in the other bar statutes singing Ben Kenobi-nobi Too Ray Eh and I went and talked to them and we bonded over Les Barker. They hadn’t heard the last verse, so I shared it with them.
Who's not with us any more
Ben Kenobi-nob too-ri-ay
Cos he got killed in episode four
Ben Kenobi-nobi-too-ri-ay
Then I went to the Bulverton which is the all night marquee by the camp site. There were Morris dancers actually Morris dancing and some people doing a square dance, (pronounced 'ceilidh') and a campfire session with an actual campfire.
There is a local beer called Darkness which is a good name for a stout. I had already had two porters in the Swan so I just wanted a small one. I pointed out to the bar staff that "half of Darkness" is the novel by Joseph Conrad on which Apocalypse Now is based.
I have a horrible feeling I actually did.
There must have been some gigs as well? Does it date me terribly to say that hearing Barbara Dickson singing Another Suitcase In Another Hall makes me anticipate a sketch about a man who wants to buy four candles? She has an astonishing voice and an eclectic repertoire. She sang The Times They Are A Changing and a Christian Viking hymn (“hear me smith of the heavens”) and an out-there dark reworking of Young Willie Has Drowned In the Yarrow. Everyone went nuts for the one from Blood Brothers. I have never seen Blood Brothers but they have probably never seen the Two Ronnies.
In the evening I had an interesting chat with a nice Australian lady who does a community radio folk show and had really wanted to hear Kathryn Tickell, who was actually in the the other tent. (I recommended Luke Jackson and Gaz Brookfield and Chris Wood for her show.)
The first act in the tent we were were actually in was a young woman called Lizzie Hardingham who sang an unexpected Calyspo tinged Rolling Down to Old Maui. The second act were a band called Banter who did electric reverb twinkly takes on mostly classic folk songs. They did Some Time I Do Reap And Some Times I Do Sow with all the verses. They did quite a dark version of the Mermaid ("and we jolly sailor lads are climbing up aloft"), and a Golden Vanity in which the cabin boy turns round and sinks his own ship as well, which is something it has often occurred to me he ought to do. In the lowlands low, obviously. I kept thinking they sounded undefinably like Home Service, and then they mentioned that John Tams is one of their heroes.
Having had too much porter and stout it now occurs to me that there is talk about Cecil Sharp (the man with the house) that I really want to listen to at nine o clock tomorrow.
SATURDAY
It was in another life time, one of toil and blood.
9.30
Talk about Cecil Sharp by man who is writing new biography. Astonishingly there has only ever been one other full biography. This man's book aimed to cover his whole life: he believed in “progressive” education and was a Fabian, which doesn’t fit in so well with the image of a dotty victorian in a hat. There was a slightly defensive tone to some of the talk. He couldn’t have been a misogynist because he worked with eminent women. I learned a lot. I will read the book.
When blackness was a virtue the world was full of mud.
11:30
Randomly go to Small Stage where the programme says there are two acts singing folk songs. Turned out to be a very good call.
Jennie Higgins does excellent takes on trad songs, emphasising ones where women have some agency. Ben and Dom are two guys who obviously like the Young Uns a great deal, doing close harmony mostly self written songs, on Subjects, like friendship and how it’s okay not to be okay. Consistently good and with a nice self effacing stage presence, especially when Dom or possibly Ben opened the act by saying how pleased he was to be in Cambridge.
I came in from the wilderness a creature void of form
3:00
We have moved on from the year when acts said it is wonderful to be performing in front of a live audience again, and are now into the era when During The Pandemic is a formative life event. Riley Bungus, the highlight of the week so far, plays old time claw hammer banjo and refers to covid as “the great unpleasantness” which he distinguishes from “the other great unpleasantness” who is standing for re-election in his home country. He plays a wonderfully raw American mountains church song, definitely the only hymn I have ever heard which specifically name checks Hezekiah, and then makes us sing Amazing Grace church style. I have got to Day Two without using the phrase “drips authenticity”.
5.30ish
Ballad session in Woodlands Hotel, during which a young man rapes his sister and sets off in a bottomless boat; another man shoots his true love in mistake for a swan; several youths are interrogated about blood on their shirtsleeves; and someone else gets entangled in a prickle holly bush. These sessions are kind of the best thing at the festival.
7.00
The Bulverton marquee is at the top of the hill. A fellow inmate of the Bristol Sea Shanty sessions recognises my hat, and we talk about folk for the evening. He joins in the kailley (pronounced "sellidar") with some enthusiasm but I decline. There are limits. Dances are now gender neutral and there was a guy dancing impressively in a wheelchair.
Good Habits do their dotty skilful funny up tempo klezmerish thing; they’ve made their encore audience participation, with one half us singing Those Were The Days and the other half singing I Will Survive.
Blackbeards Tea Party are loud. There is a man in the audience with a beard, sunglasses and a tricorn, exactly like the logo. Stuart makes the audience shout “festival” every time he says “folk” and also "Macintyre" when the Old Dun Cow burns down. The new band members fit right in, and if anything, the theatricality has been dialled up a notch. Their arrangement of Jim Jones, the first folk song I ever loved, finally seems to have clicked for me. The sound engineer means you can hear every word of Stuart's vocal. There are flowing bowls, chickens on rafts, rollicking randy dandies and pig tailed sailors hanging on behind us. I may have mentioned that they are loud. But it never stops being folk music. They are basically the best thing there is,
Antoni arrived in the middle of the night. A tree fell down blocking entrance to the Bulverton for cars. My tent went full Chumbawamba in the 20 mph gusts, and a forecast suggested it was going all the way up to 50. I decided the best advice was to dismantle it, since broken tent poles are not what we need on the second night. I did not plan to leave Blackbeard at midnight, having possibly encountered Darkness My Old Friend again and spend forty five minutes putting my tent back together but needs must when the devil etc etc.
Failed to take into account that removing tent pegs in the dark was easier than finding them again in the dark, but people in next tent have lent me some of theirs. Remind me to buy them some Fudge. Someone else had offered me a sofa in their Air BnB if it came to it.
Come in she said, I'll give you, shelter from the storm.
It really is a very friendly carnival
SUNDAY
I had forgotten what the C stands for in YMCA, I suppose, and thought that the man who wanted to ask me some questions was trying to find out what my favourite Village People record was.
He actually wanted to give me his "testimony. I doubt that it was exactly like as if Jesus had been standing right next to him, but I shall not press the point.
I have since thought up several clever answers to his question. “If you could ask God one question, what would it be?”
“How do you feel about your followers pretending they are doing questionnaires when they really want to give strangers their Testimony?” might be one possibility.
In fairness, it was Sunday.
There has already been a certain amount of hymn singing in the Ham in the form of a rather clever show about Ralph Vaughan Williams. A choir sang some of the folk songs which Vaughan Williams collected and an instrumental group did a kind of improvisation around them and then the audience were invited to sing the hymns which he appropriated the tunes for. “I heard the voice of Jesus say come unto me and rest” is based on a song called The Red Barn Murder, which has the same tune as Dives and Lazarus. (It came full circle when one of the hobo singers, maybe even Joe Hill, turned the hymn into I Heard the Voice of a Pork Chop Say Come Unto Me An Eat.) I don't think I knew that “He who would valiant be 'gainst all disaster” is one of Williams’s. It is everyone’s favourite hymn at school, although I preferred the original version with hobgoblins and foul fiends. But I am damned if I can see how it is the same tune as Our Captain Calls All Hands. I can see that you sing the one to the tune of the other if you so desired. You don’t think Ralph was making up tunes and attributing them to Trad, do you?
Due to last night's incident with a tent, a storm and a lot of dark stouts, I may not have given the recital by a very eminent and excellent traditional Irish band, the Mcarthy Family the attention it undoubtedly deserved. What made this worse is that Sandra Kerr (!!!Madeleine the Rag Doll!!!) was sitting next to me. If she noticed me dropping off I would of course have to shoot myself.
And then it was time for Show of Hands. The queue stretched all round around the marquee back to where it started, but the steward pointed me to a single vacant seat for one person at the very front. I kicked over the person next to me’s drink, but they were very nice about it. (I bought them another one.)
Show of Hand did a pretty standard Show of Hands pretty much covering the greatest hits, which makes sense because they are going to stop touring for the foreseeable future. (I could not help noticing that Phil had to sit down to play his fiddle.) And they pretty much did them straight. Steve has been doing slightly experimental versions in his solo shows but there was none of that tonight, although the man with the beard and the hat from Track Dogs assisted on the Cajon. We all joined in with Country Life and Cousin Jack and Galway Farmer and ....everything else.
I bumped into Olivia from the Brizzle Shanty session in the Bedford Bar.
Steve Knightley is standing there, I said, but it would be too sad to go over and tell him how much his music means to me.
Of course you should, she said, he’s a performer and he will be pleased.
So I did.
I don’t want to come across as a drunk fan, I said, but your music is very special to me and it’s the main reason I got into folk music.
I told him the story of hearing Roots on Folkwaves on St George’s day and realising that folk music was where I wanted to be.
He was of course entirely charming. He said he remembered the episode and apologised for not playing Roots in the concert.
It occurs to me that I had effectively just given my Testimony.
What was it Bob said about it God and Woody Guthrie?
MONDAY
12ish
John Tams, that John Tams in the big tent. Yes, he did sing Over The Hills And Far Away. Yes, he did sing When We Go Rolling Home. Yes, we did all shout out Free Toast. Yes, your blogger did find that he had something in his eye, in a very gruff manly way. He was joined by the English Fiddle Ensemble, who are four English people who play fiddles, all together. One of their tunes went dum de da da, dum de da da, tra la la la la. Another one went tiddly tiddly tiddly, la la la, tiddly tiddly tom.
3ish.
Harp and Monkey did a programme of songs themed around the Victorians. Some original and some original. I have heard the story of Bendigo the Boxer in another song, but never knew he became a methodist preacher. When he was heckled by a previous opponent he came down from the pulpit and punched them. I enjoyed the one about all the people who lived in a long terraced road in Manchester, which may have inspired a long running soap opera.
5 ish:
Standing room only for a talk on the history of Morris dancing. As you would expect. I now know a lot more than I did before. It is definitely not a pagan fertility rite and definitely not a war dance and blackface only came in a a result of American Minstrels. In the English Civil War it became a symbol of the royalists, so Cromwell suppressed it pretty throughly, and there was a big revival after the Restoration. The side Cecil Sharp saw had been founded by a revivalist only nine months earlier. My feet were sore by the end of the talk.
8ish:
Last night I had my annual half a glass of cider to make sure I still don’t like it. In the same spirit I went to hear the Unthanks on the big stage. It’s an odd act: the sisters singing is understated, ethereal...I am definitely not going to use the word fey....but on occasions like this they have an eleven piece band behind them, with drums and brass and a grand piano airlifted in specially. Some of it works. The Copper family standard Thousand Or More / Sorrows Away mashed-up with a sea shanty, with endless repeats and audience participation is great. One For Sorrow, reworked so it is about crows, I believe for a TV show about a scarecrow, is excellent and atmospheric. But sometimes it doesn’t. I really don’t think that layered, produced, theatrical arrangement does King of Rome any favours. The overall sense is of a smoother, less raucous and less improvisational Bellowhead. I enjoyed the show but felt I was watching it at arms length.
I still don’t like cider.
TUESDAY
Undoubtedly the entire highlight of the festival so far was a man in a yellow and red striped waistcoat and hat singing The Rochester Recruiting Sergeant slightly off key upstairs in the Anchor Bar.
There are rumours that he may bellow Tom Pearse’s Old Mare later in the week.
The Anchor Bar isn’t quite part of the festival, but a singing group does an open sing around most days. There is a genre of comedy song, possibly northern, possibly music hall inspired that only surface at these events. And also Streets of London.
Someone sang A Miners Life is Like a Sailor, and many clenched fists were raised. An old man sang a funny song about how They control they media and academia and how germ theory and global warming is possibly a scam and everyone is forced to think the same way. An old Quaker lady said a few words about war (she was against it) and read out a short poem by Kipling.
I don’t know what this said about the Left Wing or Right Wing qualities of folk music.
Having been excessively snarky about the YMCA man asking silly questions yesterday, I ought to mention that the group of church ladies singing Shine, Jesus Shine in the busking spot in town with actual tambourines were rather adorable. And the product of a sensible “how can we use folk week for outreach” meeting, I shouldn’t wonder.
Clearly it is better to be patronising than snarky.
Also went to a sing-around in one of the sea front hotels. It fell out as a day to go to the smaller events. Someone did a very good job with Stan Rogers White Squall. Someone else did the parody (I cannot remember if it is Kipper or Barker) in which the story of the Three Bears is set to the old Yorkshire tune about the lady with the impotent husband. The room was quite large and not everyone can hear the words, so charmingly, one half was singing “My husbands got no courage in him” and the other half were singing “My husbands got no porridge in him.”
George Samson (Granny’s Attic) and Matt Quinn (Dovetail Trio et al) are a post lockdown duo, and it is an inspired pairing. The most interesting thing happening in the world of Trad. I mean, it isn’t everyone who would name an album after a fairly obscure ballad called Sheffield Park. They did a chat with John Wilkes (old songs podcast) in the morning and opened for Eliza in the afternoon,
Eliza on absolute top form. (Her dad was two rows in front of me.). I don’t like every configuration she appears in, but this Trio is is on exactly the right side of the Folk/Not Folk line. Specially love Valiant Turpin. Highwaymen are basically land pirates after all.
Decided Salt-lines, while doubtless edifying, would have had Too Many Notes so went to the Traditional Night Out at the Arts Center, at which a number of trad adjacent performers take it in turns to do their thing. A round robin gig, some people call it. An Irish academic told a long story about a fairy horse. He thinks he has evidence that silent film star Mary Pickford was an Irish story teller and this was one of hers. Sandra Kerr did a charming lullaby she wrote for Nancy. The aforementioned George and Matt did one of those eight minute, hundred and twenty verse ballads. (It stared off like the one about the Knight who hath drowned seven fair ladies here, but then went off in its own direction.) Hardly anyone else could have carried it off.
Despite several valiant attempts the nice pirate (Jamie) I met at the Blackbeards Tea Party gig failed to get a chorus of The Rattling Bog The Bog Down In the Valley Oh going in the Bedford afterwards, but the session people were singing County Road, along with much diddling and some deeing.
My trademark Superman shoulder bag has disintegrated.
I am sitting on a bench by the sea front. A choir is singing Ghost Riders In the Sky. There are seagulls. The scene could hardly be more English.
WEDNESDAY
The Bellowhead reunion literally no-one wanted. We are a little overwhelmed.
The day started with the aforementioned John Wilks doing an “in conversation” with the aforementioned Martin Carthy. John said it takes three times as long to walk through Sidmouth with Martin because people keep stopping him in the street to say how much they love his work. To which your blogger can only say “guilty”.Wilks is a stunningly good interviewer: he lets Martin chat around his huge range of stories, just occasionally jumping in and saying “What year would this have been?” or “Could I bring you back to Bob Dylan.”
Best moment: Martin Carthy remained, and remains, friends with Dylan. He would sometimes be invited to Bob’s hotel room during tours. So he met whichever celebrities Dylan was hanging out with.
“Can you think of any examples?”
“Well, John and Paul…”
He has forgiven Paul Simon (“the trudge through the grudge”) but now sings a different version of Scarborough Fair. Asked to comment on Eliza’s band, he whirls off on how much great folk there is in the world. He refers to a London group called Goblin Folk who no one has heard of as doing for English folk what Lankum did for Irish. And also mentions Granny’s Attic. Cohen Braithwait-Kilcoyne is in the audience.
Martin is in the audience for the extended tribute to Paul Sartin. The MC is story teller Matthew Crampton. He mentions that Paul had wanted to do a duo with the veteran so it could call it Sartin/Carthy. Carthy would have been up for it. It is one thing to go to a tribute for someone like Norma Watterson or Roy Bailey who have died at an an advanced age after illustrious career: but Paul died suddenly a few weeks after lasy year's festival, and this is very hard to treat as a celebration. Paul Hutchinson did a tune with Sam Sweeney. Matthew Crampton did a very creditable coverage of "My Cockadoodledoo" (it's a very fine cock, it's all I've got) which Paul often sang at Bellowhead after-show parties. Paul's sons, Joe and Will who are now a folk duo in their own right, did a set. And then Saul Rose and Benji Kirkpatrick (the two surviving members of Faustus) asked Joe back onto the stage to do his dad's part in I Am A Brisk Lad, and it completely broke me.
Joe came back onto the stage along with Benji, Paul, John Spires, Sam Sweeney, Pete Flood and other representatives of Bellowhead to sing London Town, which I think was a Paul Sartin arrangement. Such a funny, happy song. So many Bellowhead gigs. The audience dancing.
I am almost inclined to say that it was "too soon" to do this kind of tribute. For the finale they brought one of Paul's many folk choirs onto the stage, along with other members of his family and folkies who he'd work with (which is basically all of them) to do If I Were a Blackbird. It was clear that some of the performers weren't coping at all.
In the evening I head an Scottish folk punk band called Peat and Diesel. They did exactly what you would expect them to do.
THURSDAY
It could be argued that I just listened to folk songs for thirteen hours without a break.
— Talk about Ozark ballads.
Ozark is a region in the USA, North Arkansas and South Missouri, possibly. Their ballads are wonderful rough mutations of the classic English and Scottish tradition. The Dowie Dens of Yarrow is now about seven cowboys who killed on the plains of Arrow. The Spanish Galilee in the lowlands low is now an English Robbery, and the crew try to bail it out with their hats. Lord Barnet kills his wife with a gun when he catches her with little Matty Groves. The little foot-page who betrays them is called Robert Ford. I find this stuff fascinating.
— Maddie Morris is literally the best thing there is. She has a perfect folkie voice and sings raw, honest songs about her own experience. The confessional/anthemic piece about the school teacher who called her an abomination is the best new song I heard all week. (“the girl with false eyelashes said he’s entitled to his opinion, you shouldn’t take offence.) She is paired with Frankie Archer, who reworks mostly traditional songs using a lot of electronic sampling and synth. Close the Coal House door is chilling and stark. Lucy Wan comes back and haunts her brother.
— More Maddie at the Woodlands hotel as part of Sandra Kerr’s “Tradition Reclaimed”, a (not at all in-yer-face) programme of women-in-folk-song. Everyone does the actions for Grace Darling, who rowed away on the rolling sea, over the ocean blue. (Help, help, she could hear the cries of the shipwrecked crew.) Sandra has decided “Grace had a woman’s heart” is nicer than “Grace had an English heart”
— Cohen Braithwait-Kilcoyne is the best thing in traditional music right now (not my words, Martin Carthy’s). He doesn’t only do his folkie stuff and his music hall stuff but has introduced several Caribbean tunes (he’s of mixed heritage) into the set. The Barbados version of “Keys of Canterbury” is completely joyous. The show is supposed to be an “hour in the company of” but we won’t let him leave the stage without an encore of “Rattling Old Grey Mayor.”
—…which means that the ballad session starts late, of course. It's still terrific.
-- And back to the Ham for the main headline concert, Cara Dillon singing Irish songs (and doing some rather good self-written poetry with musical accompaniment). He stories about her Very Irish Mother (Jesus Mary and Joseph what have I raised?) are glorious. Sam Lakeman is her partner and guitarist. Seth Lakeman is playing on the other stage, so they miss each other.
Drinks may then have been consumed in the Swan or the Bedford. It is hard to remembert.
Possibly this may amount to Overdoing It. I will be a little more chilled on the final day.
It could be argued that I just listened to folk songs for thirteen hours without a break.
— Talk about Ozark ballads.
Ozark is a region in the USA, North Arkansas and South Missouri, possibly. Their ballads are wonderful rough mutations of the classic English and Scottish tradition. The Dowie Dens of Yarrow is now about seven cowboys who killed on the plains of Arrow. The Spanish Galilee in the lowlands low is now an English Robbery, and the crew try to bail it out with their hats. Lord Barnet kills his wife with a gun when he catches her with little Matty Groves. The little foot-page who betrays them is called Robert Ford. I find this stuff fascinating.
— Maddie Morris is literally the best thing there is. She has a perfect folkie voice and sings raw, honest songs about her own experience. The confessional/anthemic piece about the school teacher who called her an abomination is the best new song I heard all week. (“the girl with false eyelashes said he’s entitled to his opinion, you shouldn’t take offence.) She is paired with Frankie Archer, who reworks mostly traditional songs using a lot of electronic sampling and synth. Close the Coal House door is chilling and stark. Lucy Wan comes back and haunts her brother.
— More Maddie at the Woodlands hotel as part of Sandra Kerr’s “Tradition Reclaimed”, a (not at all in-yer-face) programme of women-in-folk-song. Everyone does the actions for Grace Darling, who rowed away on the rolling sea, over the ocean blue. (Help, help, she could hear the cries of the shipwrecked crew.) Sandra has decided “Grace had a woman’s heart” is nicer than “Grace had an English heart”
— Cohen Braithwait-Kilcoyne is the best thing in traditional music right now (not my words, Martin Carthy’s). He doesn’t only do his folkie stuff and his music hall stuff but has introduced several Caribbean tunes (he’s of mixed heritage) into the set. The Barbados version of “Keys of Canterbury” is completely joyous. The show is supposed to be an “hour in the company of” but we won’t let him leave the stage without an encore of “Rattling Old Grey Mayor.”
—…which means that the ballad session starts late, of course. It's still terrific.
-- And back to the Ham for the main headline concert, Cara Dillon singing Irish songs (and doing some rather good self-written poetry with musical accompaniment). He stories about her Very Irish Mother (Jesus Mary and Joseph what have I raised?) are glorious. Sam Lakeman is her partner and guitarist. Seth Lakeman is playing on the other stage, so they miss each other.
Drinks may then have been consumed in the Swan or the Bedford. It is hard to remembert.
Possibly this may amount to Overdoing It. I will be a little more chilled on the final day.
FRIDAY
You kind of have to go with the flow. Let the festival develop its own narrative. Which isn’t always easy for those of us with chronic FOMO. If I go to the sing-around, I am not listening to the very famous person who's concert I have paid money for. If I go to the big gig I may miss out one of those moments when an old Irish lady sings a version of the Golden Vanity you have never heard before. It’s kind of like a series of coin flips. Heads, you find a session, make a new friend, hang out with an old one. Tails, you are in a pub where one man is going diddly dee on a fiddle and there’s no one you know.
This may also be true of life.
Flip: Relaxed coffee and bacon sarnie in the Rincon and catch up with today diary entries. (Decided I could probably survive without hearing a lecture on folk-collectors.)
Flip: To arts centre where the Sartin brothers, Joe and Will, are doing a duo gig. If I was in mood to appraise, I would say they are already a very good celidah type band, and Joe is a very decent singer of folk songs with bags of stage presence and personality. But that is not currently quite the point. Their younger brother [I think] Thomas (around ten) won a school singing prize for Sometime I Do Reap, and they invited him to join them for the first verse. Oh, man..,,
Flip: To Anchor where the informal singing group is still happening. They pass a twig round and when it comes to you you get to sing, if you want to. I had a go at The Great Big Ship (which, it will be recalled went down to the bottom of the sea) which didn’t quite work, but when it came round to me again I did a certain song about a certain grey mare, a certain fair, and a long list of travellers, which seemed to go down a storm. The elderly sailor-looking fellow with a white beard objected to my pronunciation of 'Arry 'Ill, and I did my “dad was Cornish, mum was a cockney” routine.
Flip: To Han for the Magpie Arc, which is Martin Simpson, Nancy Kerr, Findlay Napier, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and All. (Do you see what I did there?) Simpson always gives good value: fabulous guitarist, of course, he almost speak-sang the wonderful What You Do With What You’ve Got to the bands rocky arrangements. But I can’t quite see the point of Nancy Kerr introducing a long ballad if the drums and guitars are going to drown out the words,
Flip: Didn’t bother with the last ballad session. Had a last look round town and walked to the far end of the beach. Bumped into two people from the Anchor who asked if I would be singing with them this evening. Tempting....
Flip: Final big gig. The Young Uns have gone beyond being a very good close harmony trio and become a Phenomenon. They can go from jerking tears (sounds about suicide, Lokerbie and the Troubles) to vaudeville farce on the head of a pin. David Eagle, who's a stand up comic when he's not a folk singer, seems to be an intrinsically funny man. Told that the gig was sponsored by Exeter Brewery he improvised a song on the spot. (“I may not be a scientist, like Marie Currie…”)
Gig finishes at 10.
Do I...
a: go to Dukes where I believe a decent band possibly called the Dillymops are playing?
b: watch the parade and the fireworks?
c: head back for the last hour in the Anchor?
So.
A lady is singing Stan Rogers Field Behind the Plough. I have it in my head to do By Jingo If We Do if I get the twig. It's funny and I can get away with funny. There was apparently time for three more songs, before the group leaders did their farewell numbers. They offered me the Twig because I hadn’t had a go yet, and on a whim I did a certain other Stan Rogers number about some unsuccessful Canadian pirates. God damn them all. Apparently I sang with “great feeling” and “obvious love for the song”. Which is main thing which matters. As opposed to tune, metre or key.
11:15
Do I
1: head back to campsite , or
2: See if there is life in the Bedford (another hotel.)
So. After a long chat with some Folkie Friends (one of whom is the nicest Oscar nominated animator in the folk world) I head to the bar for the second pint. The Session musicians have degenerated into Dirty Old Town and Leaving of Liverpool. The man with the banjo keeps getting up to leave and keeps being prevailed on for another song. There are several drunken nights, appropriately, and the folkiest man I have met all week does Fields of Athenray.
Jamie the Pirate finally manages to get the Rattling Bog, The Bog Down In the Valley, Ho going, although we get confused about what precisely is on what and in what order. The landlord calls time at midnight and politely wonders if we have homes to go to about an hour later.
Not every night at a festival is like this.
But some days you luck out.
I don’t think I missed anything by not seeing the fireworks.
You kind of have to go with the flow. Let the festival develop its own narrative. Which isn’t always easy for those of us with chronic FOMO. If I go to the sing-around, I am not listening to the very famous person who's concert I have paid money for. If I go to the big gig I may miss out one of those moments when an old Irish lady sings a version of the Golden Vanity you have never heard before. It’s kind of like a series of coin flips. Heads, you find a session, make a new friend, hang out with an old one. Tails, you are in a pub where one man is going diddly dee on a fiddle and there’s no one you know.
This may also be true of life.
Flip: Relaxed coffee and bacon sarnie in the Rincon and catch up with today diary entries. (Decided I could probably survive without hearing a lecture on folk-collectors.)
Flip: To arts centre where the Sartin brothers, Joe and Will, are doing a duo gig. If I was in mood to appraise, I would say they are already a very good celidah type band, and Joe is a very decent singer of folk songs with bags of stage presence and personality. But that is not currently quite the point. Their younger brother [I think] Thomas (around ten) won a school singing prize for Sometime I Do Reap, and they invited him to join them for the first verse. Oh, man..,,
Flip: To Anchor where the informal singing group is still happening. They pass a twig round and when it comes to you you get to sing, if you want to. I had a go at The Great Big Ship (which, it will be recalled went down to the bottom of the sea) which didn’t quite work, but when it came round to me again I did a certain song about a certain grey mare, a certain fair, and a long list of travellers, which seemed to go down a storm. The elderly sailor-looking fellow with a white beard objected to my pronunciation of 'Arry 'Ill, and I did my “dad was Cornish, mum was a cockney” routine.
Flip: To Han for the Magpie Arc, which is Martin Simpson, Nancy Kerr, Findlay Napier, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and All. (Do you see what I did there?) Simpson always gives good value: fabulous guitarist, of course, he almost speak-sang the wonderful What You Do With What You’ve Got to the bands rocky arrangements. But I can’t quite see the point of Nancy Kerr introducing a long ballad if the drums and guitars are going to drown out the words,
Flip: Didn’t bother with the last ballad session. Had a last look round town and walked to the far end of the beach. Bumped into two people from the Anchor who asked if I would be singing with them this evening. Tempting....
Flip: Final big gig. The Young Uns have gone beyond being a very good close harmony trio and become a Phenomenon. They can go from jerking tears (sounds about suicide, Lokerbie and the Troubles) to vaudeville farce on the head of a pin. David Eagle, who's a stand up comic when he's not a folk singer, seems to be an intrinsically funny man. Told that the gig was sponsored by Exeter Brewery he improvised a song on the spot. (“I may not be a scientist, like Marie Currie…”)
Gig finishes at 10.
Do I...
a: go to Dukes where I believe a decent band possibly called the Dillymops are playing?
b: watch the parade and the fireworks?
c: head back for the last hour in the Anchor?
So.
A lady is singing Stan Rogers Field Behind the Plough. I have it in my head to do By Jingo If We Do if I get the twig. It's funny and I can get away with funny. There was apparently time for three more songs, before the group leaders did their farewell numbers. They offered me the Twig because I hadn’t had a go yet, and on a whim I did a certain other Stan Rogers number about some unsuccessful Canadian pirates. God damn them all. Apparently I sang with “great feeling” and “obvious love for the song”. Which is main thing which matters. As opposed to tune, metre or key.
11:15
Do I
1: head back to campsite , or
2: See if there is life in the Bedford (another hotel.)
So. After a long chat with some Folkie Friends (one of whom is the nicest Oscar nominated animator in the folk world) I head to the bar for the second pint. The Session musicians have degenerated into Dirty Old Town and Leaving of Liverpool. The man with the banjo keeps getting up to leave and keeps being prevailed on for another song. There are several drunken nights, appropriately, and the folkiest man I have met all week does Fields of Athenray.
Jamie the Pirate finally manages to get the Rattling Bog, The Bog Down In the Valley, Ho going, although we get confused about what precisely is on what and in what order. The landlord calls time at midnight and politely wonders if we have homes to go to about an hour later.
Not every night at a festival is like this.
But some days you luck out.
I don’t think I missed anything by not seeing the fireworks.
Appendix: Tolkien/Godot/Analagy, redux, or, "Someone on the Internet is Wrong"
[A reader from another site said that my references to Peter Jackson and Lord of the Rings were unfair, and a fruitful discussion occurred. My side of the debate is reproduced here.]
1:
This is indeed a problematic passage which has been the subject of much debate by Rilstonian scholars.
It has frequently been noted that Rilstone presents the argument as a dialogue, between unspecified "Tolkien fans" who claim that Peter Jackson damaged Lord of the Rings, and an unspecified interlocutor who retorts that the text of the book is unchanged. Rilstone puts quotation marks around the second comment ("The book is the same as it always was".) It is therefore fallacious to assume that the matter inside the quotation marks necessarily represents Rilstone's own position: he, after all, regarded himself as a Tolkien fan, and had been virulently critical of the Rings of Power TV series.
Rilstone says that there is an analogy between this argument and the theatrical argument which is the subject of his epistle. He has just referenced two reviewers who have specifically identified the act of adapting a theatrical work with the act of physically damaging a painting. One writer has said that actors who had staged a production in which male characters were played by female actors were "vandals" (not "like vandals" -- actual vandals). Another had said that disregarding an (admittedly fairly important) stage direction was the same as "doodling on a Rembrant". Rilstone had also referred to claims that eliding racial slurs in books was the same thing as wilfully desecrating religious sites; and that adding content warnings to texts was the same as, or would inevitably lead to, Nazi book burnings.
The analogy he was drawing, while inexact, was clear enough: on the one side, those who think that film adaptation should merely transpose texts to the screen; and that theatrical productions should merely be neutral presentations of an authors supposed intention; and on the other side, those who think that any production of a playe and any cinematic adaptation of a literary text is by definition a new work, to be judged on its own merits, and in no way superseding or abolishing the source-material.
Rilstone can be demonstrated to have been familiar with Malory's Morte D'Arthur, and was also an admirer of John Boormans movie Excalibur. The latter was certainly inspired by the former, and was promoted as an adaptation thereof, but is in fact a highly creative and personal interpretation of some of the themes of the medieval work. Had Boorman adapted Lord of the Rings (as he had wanted to) it can be assumed that he would have treated it with similar latitude. Doubtless some people would have argued that this would have done posthumous harm to Tolkien or even impeded his passage through the afterlife. But it would probably have been an interesting film.
Changes to covers, introductions and illustrations, while an interesting study in their own right, are not strictly relevant to the point Rilstone is making. The idea that a dramatic adaptation mediates and informs subsequent readings is much more interesting -- although even this doesn't amount to an alteration to the text. It could very well be argued that a single, highly successful production of Waiting For Godot with a female cast could be so influential that all subsequent readers would automatically assume that the characters were female; and that even a minor production would have a small tendency to do so. For much of the 20th century reader response to Hamlet was conditioned by Lawrence Olivier's highly successful movie version: indeed, many non-specialist readers probably imagined Olivier's to be a neutral, unmediated account of "what Shakespeare really meant." In fact, Olivier was presenting a very specific and partial interpretation of the text, strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud and John Dover Wilson. But if this is true, it is necessarily true of any and all productions of theatrical works: we read plays in the light of decades or centuries of stage history.
Rilstone was open about the fact that his cinema and theatre reviews were hastily written: his original plan had been to supplement his serious writing with a lighter series of morning-after reports on artistic outings, which might only amount to "it was a nice gig, I enjoyed it" and although his arts diary had expanded beyond that remit, it was never as considered or as closely argued as his blog. He was always gratified, if wryly amused, when people responded to his remarks, but in general, refrained from responding and went back to the series business of over-thinking comic books.
2:
Rilstone watchers waited with baited breath to see what his next move would be. Would he
1: Double down on the language. "Yeah -- well so's your face!"
2: Simply restate his not especially controversial premise "There is an analogy between saying that unfaithful movie adaptations damage books and saying that unfaithful productions of plays are the same as physically altering paintings."
3: Flounce out and say that he is obviously wrong about everything and is never going to review another play until he dies.
Two questions remain:
Would the match have been more interesting, albeit less entertaining, if his opponent had said "Actually, the two things aren't very similar, for the following reasons..."?
Why do twenty year old adaptations of century old novels induce such strong emotions?
3:
Analogy and Meta-Analogy: The Deep Structure of Rilstonian Rhetoric
To clarify the central argument of Rilstone's text, it is helpful to present it in tabular form.
Rilstone refers to ten real and hypothetical events:
A
A production of Waiting for Godot in which the four male parts are played by women
B
The act of wantonly damaging a building or object (vandalism)
C
A production of Footfalls in which May is allowed to move freely around the stage
D
The act of making an intervention on a classic work of art (doodling on a Rembrant)
E
A movie adaptation of Lord of the Rings
F
The act of changing, destroying or altering ("violating") the text of Lord of the Rings
G
Deleting the word "n*gg*r" from Thank You Jeeves
H
Deliberately and specifically damaging a site regarded as holy, e.g inverting a crucifix or nailing bacon to a synagogue. ("Desecration")
I
Printing explanatory or apologetic text in copies of Thank You Jeeves
J
Prohibiting, confiscating and publicly destroying literary texts ("Nazi book burning")
He states that each pair of events have been claimed to be analogous:
I: The Spectator Magazine claimed that A is analogous to B.
II: The theatre critic of the Guardian claimed that C is analogous to D
III: Unspecified "Tolkien Fans" have claimed E is analogous to F
IV: Members of a P.G Wodehouse fan group have claimed that G is analogous to H
V: Other members of the P.G Wodehouse fan group have claimed that I is analogous to J.
Rilstone's proposal is that Claim I and Claim II are analogous to Claim III. His argument appears to be that since Claim III is fallacious, Claims I and II are also fallacious; or, more weakly, that they are three examples of the same kind of argument. He also asserts, less specifically, that Claims I and II are analogous to claims IV and V. This is clearly are rather complicated form of argument; since it involves drawing analogies between claims that are themselves based on analogy.
However, the shape of his argument may be clearly seen: cases A, C, E, G and I are all examples of the interpretation of literary texts; and cases B, D, F, and J are examples of making permanent changes to valuable objects. Rilstone's observation is that The Lord of the Rings, Footfalls, Waiting for Godot and Thank You Jeeves are not exhausted by the creation of new productions and adaptations, where destroying or physically altering a painting or systematically destroying extant copies of a work make that work, in its original form, permanently unavailable.
As a matter of fact, a desecrated church or temple could generally be reconsecrated; and the bowdlerisation of a text might, over years or decades, make the un-bowdlerised version un-available. To that extent, changing the title of Agatha's Christie's text to "And Then There Were None" is indeed analogous to Hitler destroying every copy of Betolt Brecht, because the end result in both cases is to make Mother Courage and Ten Little N-rs unavailable.
Anti-Rilstonian scholar [redacted] argues that the meta-analogy fails because
1: An adaptation of a literary work may result in a physical change to the form in which the book is distributed (new cover, blurb, back-matter, introductory material, etc.) and
2: An adaptation of a literary work will effect every subsequent re-reading of it.
It may in fact be that some enthusiasts would only wish to read Thank You, Jeeves in facsimile -- that any variation from the original 1934 edition (cover, blurb, back matter, dust jacket etc) amounts to the creation of a new and inferior work. In that sense the proposed changes to the book do make the 1934 version unavailable. Many comic book fans would validly say that a Superman comic printed on high quality art paper between hard covers is a different proposition from an original cheaply printed periodical with many advertisements for bubble gum, air-rifles and brine-shrimp interrupting the story. But this does not appear to be what the hypothetical claim (that Jackson violated Tolkien) and the supposed response (Tolkien's text is still unchanged) was referring to, and so, while very interesting, it does not effect the argument Rilstone is making.
It may in fact be the case that a film adaptation of a work conditions subsequent readings of it -- that once you have seen the 1939 Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes will always look like Basil Rathbone in your head. The curved pipe, for example, inveigles itself into any reading of the texts, despite the fact that Doyle never mentions it. Readings of Mary Shelley necessarily struggle agains the image of Boris Karloff. Indeed, the better the adaptation, the greater the risk: very few people imagine Tolkien's Boromir to look like a Viking, because that so clearly clashes with the text; but nearly everyone imagines Gandalf looking and sounding like Ian McKellen because his portrayal was so faithful to the original. (Jackson was, indeed, very much presenting a consensus Middle-earth that can be traced back through Ralph Bashki and the Hildenbrandt brothers.) Again, this real possibility does not seem to be what is implied by the original "Jackson violated Tolkien" claim, and while interesting, is not relevant to Rilstone's argument.
It is, in fact, highly probable that "Jackson violated Tolkien" is simply a flowery way of saying "I did not think that his adaptation was very good" and, equally, that "It would be sacrilegious to remove the n-word from Jeeves" means "I would rather they didn't" and "Changing Beckett's stage directions is like smashing old buildings to pieces" means "I don't think that they should do this". The drawing of close analogies, and indeed the refutation of those analogies, is not particularly helpful.
Rilstone's case -- in an essay that was not about Tolkien but about a political clown show -- was that many people regard literary texts as being sacrosanct, and that he regards this view as fallacious.
4:
But apart from that, how did you enjoy the play?
Steeleye Span - Fisherman's Friends - Jez Lowe - Granny Attic - Nick Dow - Bird in the Belly - Sairi - Ryan Young and David Foley - Cohan Braithwaite Kilcoyne - Gardarene - Joshua Burnell - Stream of Sound - Peter and Barbara Snape - Mossy Christian - Megan Wisdom - Melrose Quartet - Spooky Men's Chorale - Miranda Sykes and Hannah Martin -The Wilderness Yet - Holly Clarke - Grace Petrie - Serious Sam Barett - Martin Simpson - Rosie Hood -Spiers and Boden - Jack Rutter - The Shackleton Trio - Daoiri Farrell - Jackie Daly & Matt Cranitch - Chris Wood - Exmouth Shantymen
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