Owing to the great generosity of organiser Dick Dixon and his team, Rob and I were allotted four hours of performance time over two days of the Warwick Folk Festival, on the Saturday and Sunday, 28thand 29th July. This was a great event with a great line-up and we felt pleased and privileged to be involved.
The four hours all proved to be very different in nature. On the Saturday morning, Rob held a workshop teaching Asturian and Galician tunes, where I ‘played Johnny’ and helped out with guitar accompaniments. After lunch, we then made our way into the town centre to play an hour at the lovely Catalan Restaurant. Family commitments then meant we needed to return to St Albans that evening. However, we returned early Sunday morning for an hour on the Main Stage and then, on Sunday afternoon, we played an hour at the Living Tradition venue on the festival campus.
The Saturday morning workshop went really well. Rob has a lot of experience as a teacher and he quickly got a talented group of musicians rattling along with some tunes from our extended repertoire. For helping us set up in advance of the workshop and then acting as our saviour in transporting us down to the Catalan Restaurant in the town centre, we should mention the assistance provided to us by Festival team member, Jack Shuttleworth - who, at one point (as it coincided with the bus drivers lunch break) had to unpack a variety of musical and other equipment from his car to ship us both down to the town centre! Cheers Jack – we owe you a pint!
The gig in the restaurant went well. It was a busy Saturday lunchtime dining crowd in there but, to their credit and our benefit, all the diners seemed up for listening to folk music – and we kept the session pretty upbeat and lively throughout. We received warm applause throughout and, when we came off stage, the extremely friendly proprietor of the restaurant then kindly organised a table for us outside, where we could go and have some tapas and a drink to slake our thrist on a hot afternoon. Whilst not an advertising agency, I should say that both Rob and I thought the tapas at the restaurant were fantastic – and, be assured, if there is one thing Rob knows a lot about, it is Spanish food!
The Main Stage on Sunday morning was both a great experience and great experience. We were given a slot with no-one before us and no-one immediately behind us. As such, we had the absolute luxury of a proper sound check with top flight sound engineers, well before the doors opened.
The Main Stage tent at Warwick is a big place and we were very pleased to see a healthy crowd of around 80-90 people in the audience when we were called onto stage. The mixed monitor sound back to us on stage was superbly done and we were right up for playing. We played well and had some great feedback after the performance - particularly about it being ‘nice to hear folk with some content’. Our dash to the CD tent where post-performance CD signings could be done was temporarily halted by a massive downpour which began just as we finished. While sheltering from the downpour, this gave us a chance for a nice chat backstage with the very friendly and encouraging Tim Edey and Brendan Power (whom I had seen on TV play a phenomenal set on the Sky Arts coverage of the Cambridge Folk Festival the night before). As we slipped out through the body of the (dry) Main Stage tent, a number of the sheltering audience came up, said ‘hello’ and expressed how much they’d enjoyed the set. We then had similar very pleasing conversations in the CD tent when we got there.
The food at the festival was generally very good so, after another excellent lunch we had chance to have a look around the festival site. In doing so, it was wonderful to meet some old friends and to make some new ones. It was lovely to see friends again from the Carrington Triangle Folk Club in Nottingham, the Cambridge Folk Club, and singers from shanty group Sharp as Razors who we had met at the Alcester Winter Festival earlier in the year. We also saw Murray Grianger from Heritique who we have known for a while and, at long last, we also met the lovely Fiona Cuthill from the excellent Scots band Rallion. Indeed, not only did we have the chance to chat with her but we also got the chance to see them play.
Having heard their first album, we knew Rallion were going to be very good and so it turned out to be! Fiona is a wonderful composer. As many will know, her tune Le Vent de Nord was taken up and named in honour of the French Canadian band of the same name and used in their song Les Larmes Aux Yeux, which we recorded a translated version of (also including her tune) on our CD, The Bite. Indeed, Fiona was telling us that she has recently had chance to play the tune with Le Vent de Nord and it was great to hear Rallion play their version, embedded in a tune set.
The more I hear of Fiona’s compositions the more I want to talk about them. For example, her tune ‘Waiting for Dawn’ is one of the most beautiful tunes I have heard. As she has been for all the time we have known and communicated with her, Fiona was very generous and during the course of the Rallion performance, she even mentioned the links between our bands and noted our presence in the audience. Many thanks Fiona.
Sadly, we couldn’t see all of Rallion’s performance as we had to be getting our skates on and travelling across the festival campus to the Living Tradition session - which had the nice feel of a cosy folk club but, by now, on a hot and sunny Sunday afternoon. It was an intimate venue, and the audience were very appreciative of our music– to the extent that we had the chance to meet a few more people at a second signing event at the CD tent.
Pretty tired and exhausted, we finally turned for home not long after we had finished our second round of signings. There was Olympic action in Coventry and we didn’t want to get caught in traffic. All in all, we were very satisfied with what we had achieved over a pleasantly busy weekend in Warwick. Our thanks go to all the organisers at the Warwick Folk Festival for the invitation to play and the welcome and support given to us throughout the weekend by all the members of the organisational team. We sincerely hope that we are invited back again to the festival at some date in the future.