Cropredy Festival 2002
Blindy and his chums took off to the annual Cropredy Folk Festival in Oxfordshire over the weekend - an affair which lasted from Thursday to Sunday. Though the weather could have been better (there were several occasions where it was necessary to shelter from the thundery showers) the general ambience of the place lifted our spirits sufficiently to weather these meteorological inconveniences.
Highlights included the evergreen “Dubliners” who covered just about every reel, jig and drinking song that yer average Joycean scholar could recall. Friday’s line-up lacked the balls of a big name, though Broderick atoned for themselves well with some gutsy tunes. There was also a prolonged period of about two hours where 5 of us sheltered from a cloudburst under my fishing umbrella, where the less enthusiastic of us were seen to droop somewhat. Still, Fairport Convention (the Early Years) and several pints of Festival Ale soon cheered us up again.
This opened the way for a Saturday to make or break the festival, and make it, indeed, it did. The highlight here for me was the wonderful gusto of the voice of Deborah Bonham (the sister of the late, great Zeppelin drummer). As the sun burst through the clouds in welcoming splendour, this vocalist, hitherto unknown to the bulk of the crowd, treated us to a volley of songs which, whilst folk-rock in timbre, never dissolved into the mishmash of middle-of-the-road stuff that I personally find irritating in this area of music. The more I listened, the more the influences of Janis Joplin and Robert Plant shone through. She stomped out some great rockers, a tender balad about a stone house with which she associated the dead Bonhams (two brothers and a father) - and then threw in to everyone’s great surprise, a resounding version of Zepp’s “Battle of Evermore” and finished with “Rock ‘n’ Roll”. Never has an encore been greeted with such gratitude from the artist, who was clearly phased by the occasion.
Eventually, the homely sounds of Fairport Convention drifted onto the stage, and their final four hour set rose head and shoulders above the rest of the bands, in respect of material and musicianship. They reeled, rocked, balladed and harmonised their way effortlessly through a rollercoaster of material, until by the time the final note of the traditional sequence of songs from “Matty Groves” to the anthemic “Meet on the Ledge” died away, there was not a dry eye in the house - and this time, it wasn’t raining.
Splendid. See you all there next year then, eh?
Highlights included the evergreen “Dubliners” who covered just about every reel, jig and drinking song that yer average Joycean scholar could recall. Friday’s line-up lacked the balls of a big name, though Broderick atoned for themselves well with some gutsy tunes. There was also a prolonged period of about two hours where 5 of us sheltered from a cloudburst under my fishing umbrella, where the less enthusiastic of us were seen to droop somewhat. Still, Fairport Convention (the Early Years) and several pints of Festival Ale soon cheered us up again.
This opened the way for a Saturday to make or break the festival, and make it, indeed, it did. The highlight here for me was the wonderful gusto of the voice of Deborah Bonham (the sister of the late, great Zeppelin drummer). As the sun burst through the clouds in welcoming splendour, this vocalist, hitherto unknown to the bulk of the crowd, treated us to a volley of songs which, whilst folk-rock in timbre, never dissolved into the mishmash of middle-of-the-road stuff that I personally find irritating in this area of music. The more I listened, the more the influences of Janis Joplin and Robert Plant shone through. She stomped out some great rockers, a tender balad about a stone house with which she associated the dead Bonhams (two brothers and a father) - and then threw in to everyone’s great surprise, a resounding version of Zepp’s “Battle of Evermore” and finished with “Rock ‘n’ Roll”. Never has an encore been greeted with such gratitude from the artist, who was clearly phased by the occasion.
Eventually, the homely sounds of Fairport Convention drifted onto the stage, and their final four hour set rose head and shoulders above the rest of the bands, in respect of material and musicianship. They reeled, rocked, balladed and harmonised their way effortlessly through a rollercoaster of material, until by the time the final note of the traditional sequence of songs from “Matty Groves” to the anthemic “Meet on the Ledge” died away, there was not a dry eye in the house - and this time, it wasn’t raining.
Splendid. See you all there next year then, eh?