Folk By the Oak 2021

 Hatfield House 

Hatfield House has a blessed place in my memory. A little way up the suburban line from where I grew up: an old English Stately home on an extensive estate. Endless school trips to see wood panelled floors that Queen Elizabeth I may have trodden on; family picnics, frisbies, walks in the woods; and on one occasion a steam engine display with real parachutes. They used to be able to point out the very oak that Elizabeth was sitting under when she heard that she was Queen. It inconveniently died and was moved to a museum, but there are still some very old trees in the grounds. Which one is the oak I am not exactly sure. Perhaps oak is singular plural, like someone who goes to Africa and says that they have seen lion and elephant.

Folk by the Oak has been running since 2008. It is the best one day festival to go to if you want to hear a lot of acts: it boasts that it only books headliners. Less good, I suspect, if you want to soak up festival atmosphere with music in the background, although there was a fairly extensive children's area and cryptic announcements about puppets shows and "bee yoga". The pestilence has taken its toll this year, of course. In previous years there have been two stages, with the second "Acorn" (geddit) stage originally intended for up-and-coming-acts but in practice often hosting crowd-favourites like Grace Petrie and Sam Kelly. It would have been nice to be able to bounce between big stage and little stage with narry a music-free minute, but naturally that wasn't possible this year, and folk megastar Richard Thompson had to drop out due to quarantine issues. There were on-the-daty casualties as well, with the Young Uns in self-isolation and Sam Sweeney involved in a non-covid related and thankfully not serious road accident. But the show went on joyfully. 

I have to admit that I am getting a taste for socially distanced music: its quite nice to sit in your designated spot in your camp chair for eleven hours solid, without that endless weaving in and out of crowds to get a good spot in the mosh.

I hadn't heard the Bookshop Band before; slightly fay, decentered songs loosely (very loosely) inspired by novels, which book me slightly in mind of Bristol's Two White Cranes (and therefore, I suppose, Laura Marling.) Kathryn Priddy also offered relaxed, mellow self-written fare. 

Jack Rutter, standing in for Sam Sweeney, was much more in my folk comfort zone. I know him as one third of the instrumental Moore, Moss and Rutter; but much prefer him in this solo vocalist incarnation. He's the sort of single who wants you to know that his next song came from Frank Kidson's Folke Songes of the North Countrie, although he's not above covering a less traditional Peter Gabriel track. I respect the hell out of someone who will do a big ballad like Fair Janet and Young James in a festival setting (where 100% listener attention cannot be guaranteed); and the audience was entirely on-side for a "from Hull and Halifax and Hell" singalong. He ended his set on "hey john barleycorn" and I had to retreat to the beer tent.

How was I to know that Scrumpy wasn't the same as cider and they sometimes put ice in it? Cider-drinking companion Richard didn't seem to mind too much.

Kitty Macfarlane remains sublime and quite unlike anything else on the folk scene. She sings songs about eels and starlings and sea silk and beachcombers. Her lyrics can by mystical and incantatory ("for until I am undone I'll weave salt water into sun") although she sometimes hits a good melody as well ("oh for the wrecking days..."). She incorporates field recordings into her performance and has now acquired a band, which, thankfully, adds a texture to her performance without overwhelming it. Eeels' weird migratory patterns are a kind of metaphor for free movement. You probably need to hear if you haven't done so before.

Festival Patron and compere Jim Moray stepped into the space left by the Young Uns to offer up his own brand of pop-infused tradition. I can never hear Lord Douglas too many times; it still feels to me like something out of Malory. The Straight Line and the Curve, appropriately based on Elizabethan magic is as strange and evocative a lyric as I think I have ever heard ("four golden signs all elements combine forged in the ministry of fire"). He said that the Hatfield set was a warm up for his first planned post-lockdown show in Bath next week, which I shall of course report on...

I really don't see the point of Skinny Lister, although quite clearly at least two thirds of the audience were mainly there to listen to them. Sub Pogues Irish inspired folk punk without the wit or authenticity of Lankum, although I enjoyed the guy waving his double bass around. I suspect they would have been better in their original location on the Acorn stage with dancing more permitted. Everyone else seemed to love it.

Kate Rusby is of course lovely. It says something about the hierarchy of folk that she was the one act that Jim Moray spoke personally about having been influenced and inspired by; and that potential headliner Sam Kelly was now in her band. She's just put out an album of music which inspired her as a teenager, so we got surprisingly off-piste material like Every Little Tings Gonna Be All Right, and, er, the theme from The Littlest Hobo.

Seasick Steve is not, of course, my normal kind of act. I think festivals quite often think in terms of a folkie bill-header (Kate Rusby) followed by a slightly less traditional late-night show-ender. (Certainly a lot of people seemed to go home after Kate.) But this was a lovely place to end the festival; with Steve's last freak-out riff on the home-made guitar segueing into the traditional fireworks.

Hopefully things will be more normal last year. But the restrictions couldn't take the shine of the crowning glory of a right royal pageant. (Stop it now - Ed.)