festival focus f72 The Festive Season
No, not that one, this one. For more than sixty years, folk(ish) festivals have been multiplying and diversifying. Colin Irwin does an overview.
P
icture this. It is August, 1955. Sir Anthony Eden has replaced Winston Churchill as Prime Min- ister; Ruth Ellis is the last woman hanged in Britain after killing her boyfriend in a crime of passion; Kim Philby denies he’s a Russian spy; rail- waymen and dockers call off their nation- al strikes; Donald Campbell hits 202mph to smash the water speed record; and commercial television (with adverts and everything) is about to be crash into peo- ple’s homes.
Bill Haley was rocking around the clock, Slim Whitman was topping the charts with Rose Marie and Prince Philip launched his Duke of Edinburgh award. And, while denim jeans become the sum- mer’s de rigueur fashion statement, swag- gering Teddy Boys with Brylcreemed hair, long coats with velvet collars and drain- pipe trousers were the new scourge of the nation. And a sleepy seaside town in East Devon was hit by an invasion of something even more terrifying… folk dancers.
There were at least a hundred of the
blighters. Young people, a lot of them who’d come down on the train (for Sid- mouth had a station then) from London and other dens of iniquity to dance the week away. In public too. A few of them also sang a bit… but mercifully this was mostly confined to the privacy of their own tents.
Who knew then what it would all lead to? Nobody ever imagined this little flock of strange, dancey people would then go home, breed and return in bigger numbers with more dances and slowly, but very surely over the years, grow and grow until it turned into the monstrously almighty beast that we now speak of in hushed tones and is known as… the Folk Festival?
It may not be entirely true to suggest that Sidmouth in 1955 was the very first event of its kind; but, with its colourful dis- plays of the dance tradition, an onslaught of enthusiasts enjoying the seaside envi- ronment and the opportunity to show off their steps to the uninitiated, it certainly gave life to the whole shooting match.
Because the uninitiated loved it, form- ing large queues to watch the perfor-
mances, which even included a mummers’ play. The Volunteer pub loved it too, as musicians and dancers repaired there for their refreshment and some extra-curricu- lar sessions.
It was run under the auspices of the English Folk Dance & Song Society, though there was precious little song in those early years. Mike Waterson would tell the story of the Watersons getting a very frosty reception from the doorkeepers when they turned up at one of the early festivals hoping to do a few songs.
Having made a profit of nearly £239 in that inaugural year, there was no ques- tion that the Sidmouth experiment would- n’t be repeated, although in 1959 and ’60 it abandoned Sidmouth and switched to Exmouth to spread the joy. By ’61, howev- er, it was back in Sidmouth, where it has remained ever since, assuming the reputa- tion of being the doyen of folk festivals.
Anyone attending those early Sid- mouth events would doubtless be aston- ished – perhaps even aghast – gazing around at the mass of festivals that have arisen in its wake in seemingly every nook and cranny of the nation every summer.
You can’t blink these days without bumping into a festival. They come in all shapes, flavours and sizes and there are hundreds and hundreds of them. The eFes- tivals website, which doesn’t concern itself with musical genre, lists over a thousand of them, ranging from Glastonbury (with its 2,000+ performers, including every- thing from Kylie to cabaret) to 3 Daft Monkeys at Chagstock and all manner of Manchester Pride, Hampton Court Palace festival and Dogstival events between.
For those loosely relevant to this maga- zine there are in the region of 700 festivals across Europe. They cover all corners. There are island festivals in Shetland, Orkney, Skye and Lewis right down to the Big Wheel Blues Festival in the Isle of Man and Sark Folk Festival in the Channel Islands.
They encompass specialist festivals in every music tributary imaginable… the Wales International Harp Festival in Caernarvon; the Ukulele Festival of Wales; the Cursus Cider & Music Festival in Dorset; the Piano & Accordeon Workshop Week-
end in Somerset; the Cornish Bluegrass Festival; Harwich International Sea Shanty Festival… the list goes on and on.
All this and a plethora of traditional customs – revived and continuous – from the ’Obby ’Osses of Padstow to Straw Bears at Whittlesea, the Burryman ceremo- ny in Scotland, Bampton Morris at Whit- suntide, burning tar barrels at Allendale, the horn dancers of Abbots Bromley, et al.
There are artist-driven events like Fair-
port’s Cropredy weekend and Kate Rusby’s Underneath The Stars festival, as well as venue-themed escapes such as Costa del Folk in Portugal and Ibiza and the Great British Folk Weekend at Butlin’s in Skegness.
And that’s before we even touch Ire- land, which manages to conjure a festival in every town in the country on every sub- ject under the sun… all at the same time in the case of Kilkenny… culminating in the orgy of music and partying that consti- tutes the fleadh. Spontaneously knitting together a jumble of improvised words to reflect his impressions of the infamous Lis- doonvarna festival in the matchmaking spa town in Co. Clare, Christy Moore had no idea it would evolve into an iconic song that would sustain him throughout the rest of his career.
ing from the Oslo World Music Festival to Helsinki’s World Village Festival, Reykjavik Blues Festival, the Mazurkas of the World festival in Warsaw and Lorient Intercel- tique in Brittany.
T And you do wonder that, with so
many different events to choose from every single weekend in every single area imaginable, how on earth do they all sur- vive? The answer is, a lot of them don’t. But, says Steve Heap of the Association of Festival Organisers, “for everyone that col- lapses, two more pop up. The number of festivals goes up each year.”
With so many events providing so much music in so many different places on so many weekends, all the evidence sug- gests the festival scene has never been in
he festival has wide tentacles and a broad reach, stretching right across the vast expanses of Europe, with a dazzling array of localised events, vary-
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