There was a need to be up early and gone on the Saturday morning of the Tenterden Folk Festival as we had a fair distance to travel and we needed to be ready and set up for a club-type session beginning at lunchtime.
The M25 was pretty busy even at that hour, as we followed a receding rain front across the Thames and into Kent. It must have been a wet night for the first-night campers at the festival, but Saturday promised (and turned out) to be a fine day of autumnal sunshine.
We made good time getting to Tenterden and were able to find an excellent parking spot at the town museum, not far from The Vine Inn where we were playing that night. In fact, we had enough time to scout out our first venue for the day, have a good cup of coffee, and then look around the very attractive town centre before proceedings really began. The town was already very busy and alive with a huge and colourful array of morris teams and other dancers and musicians – a truly exciting day was in prospect for the town.
We returned to the car, picked up the instruments and made our way across to The Saddlery at the back of The White Lion. Here was a nice, club-like room, where we met up with Bob and Kathy Drage, who are such energetic figures in the Kent folk scene, and the MC for the session, Nick from band Rude Albert. The club session could have been busier, but the atmosphere was good and there were excellent singers and musicians on throughout, including the Foxglove Trio and Chris Sarjeant. Our own performance seemed well appreciated and we felt we played well.
After a late lunch, we then made it down the high street to the festival marquee on parkland at the edge of the town centre, where we were in concert for a 30 minute session later that afternoon. Earlier in the day we had scouted the marquee out and struck up a useful conversation with the very pleasant guys at Talking Elephant records, who kindly sold some CDs for us through the day.
The marquee concert went really well, and we had around 40-50 in the audience. Again, we felt we played well and received got some excellent feedback from the audience after the show – some of whom promised to come along and watch our evening showcase event at The Vine Inn.
After the concert, we stopped on and watched the next act, a very fine young singer songwriter, Pierre Vincent, before making our way to The Vine Inn for some pub grub ahead of our concert there.
We didn’t really know what sort of gig it was going to be at the Vine. By and large, our music is for listening to - it isn’t natural pub music. However, we had picked a lively set and looked forward to getting on with playing. Knowing that any pub gig is going to be noisy and that a couple of acoustic instruments tucked away in a corner are quickly going to be drowned out, we decided to make use of our brand-new p.a. system to give us the requisite boost. We are still getting into a rhythm of set up but such are the benefits of the system we have got (Yamaha PAS 500) it is incredibly transportable, neat and easy to set up.
As with any pub, space is at a premium and we were tucked into a small pocket of space not far from the bar. The audience was a mixture of ordinary pub-goers who were just out for a Saturday night, and folk followers who were listening to what we were doing. It was also nice to meet up with some friends from a different part of our lives who happened to be in the pub as we struck up –quite a coincidence.
Throughout the evening, we were well looked after by the staff at the Vine but would have to confess to getting a little disheartened that we weren’t really distracting too many people from discussing the day’s football scores, etc.
So, after the first 40 minute set, we had a break to regain our strength and then, as we struck up for our second set of the evening, a wonderful thing happened! As we started to play our new set of Asturian jigs (muneiras) a table of boisterous young Slovaks immediately leapt up to perform some of their traditional dances on the little dance floor in front of us – and wow - could they dance, whizzing and birrelling round and round. The gig was immediately transformed from quite hard work to being great fun. These youngsters clearly loved to dance and of course, over and above our dance music many of our songs are in jig or reel format. So, we encouraged them to keep dancing and they had a great laugh and we had a great time through the rest of the second set. It was also nice that we were able to do this in the company of Alan Castle, the phenomenally hard working festival organiser at Tenterden.
With the smile restored to our faces, we then packed our new gear away - which had performed exceedingly well for us - rolled it round to the car and headed for home, arriving back in St Albans around 12.30am.
Since I was driving that night and had kept myself dry in a pub all night, I was damn-well going to have a beer when I got home! And, just as I sat in the kitchen savouring a nice bottle of Innes and Gunn, thinking I’d missed the family who must all be tucked up in bed, my son arrived home after a night out with his pals. It was great catching up with him in the early hours and finding out about his first couple of weeks at University. After that, I didn’t take much rocking to sleep!