The Barr Brothers receive Tonder festival crisis pants

The Barr Brothers' previous gig was in a northern outpost of Quebec and it had taken two days to get to southern Denmark with a pile of gear that included a harp and a percussive bicycle wheel. However, on arrival it rapidly became clear that all was not as it should be.

"We lost an antique organ somewhere between here and Quebec," Andrew Barr (left) told his audience at Tonder yesterday. "Which is terrible because it means a lot to us. Plus we lost all our clothes. But the festival said 'That's OK. We have underwear for you.' So I would like to congratulate the festival for being that on it that they anticipated someone here would lose their underwear."

Instead of his missing guitar slide Barr improvised with a cigarette lighter. "The missing instrument is a kind of pump organ, like a harmonium," he said later. "They used to use them on battlefields during the civil war for funerals. We came by Air Canada with a final leg on Lufthansa and I don't know which of them lost the gear.

"So Brad and I received a toothbrush each and two medium sized pairs of white underpants. Now it looks as if the organ has turned up and will be with us in time for gig number two tomorrow, so that's OK. We still don't have our clothes though."

Jing Haase is the middle of three generations of her family to volunteer at Tonder - her parents are among the festival's founders - and is the lucky lady with responsibility for The Barr Brothers' crisis pants.

"Me and Eric are the panic team," she explained. "We are the kind of crisis task force and we have a large red bag of supplies to start us off. We do tampons but not condoms and there's women's underwear in there as well - though it's not very sexy stuff.

"The weirdest thing we ever had to do was when Taj Mahal arrived and his suitcase disintegrated."

That's a reason to sing the blues.

"Yes. Especially because it was a Sunday and all the shops were shut. But Tonder is a small town - fewer than 10,000 people - and so I rang up the man who runs the suitcase shop and he opened up so Taj Mahal could go down and pick one out. I've also got a dentist on standby, for emergencies.

"The Barr Brothers have been unlucky to lose their luggage... their clothes still haven't turned up, have they? We gave them a festival T-shirt each, which they wore for today's gig. But I have a feeling that they may need to buy new knickers tomorrow."

* Yesterday's post from Tonder was about Billy Bragg and the EDL's irony-free expat branch.

* And Friday's was this about Admiral Fallow having some exchange rate difficulties.

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Billy Bragg at the Tonder festival on the EDL's expat branch

It was the pithy banter, the total absence of mumbling and the way in which there were approximately no notes out of place that rooted me to the spot. I'd always thought of Billy Bragg as politically less subtle than Ben Elton during his standup days and yet - with the flawless stagecraft as a runway - the realisation unfolded last night that, like Peter Tatchell, he is a man with whom history has caught up. My plan to slope off for a dose of Lau evaporated.

Although he should always be thought of first and foremost as the milkman of human kindness (because it's a phrase of genius), he's recently morphed into something of a silver fox - lucky bloke - and in the context of the equal marriage laws, his song Sexuality has finally ceased to be a slightly boastful paean to shagging ("I've had relations, with girls from many nations") and now wears the glamour of a prescient civil rights song. That's the odd thing about progressive politics, I guess: if you hang around long enough there's a distinct possibility that you'll end up in the mainstream eventually.

Tonder flipping loved him anyway. More to the point, he mentioned during his set that he'd recently heard that the English Defence League - best known for its racially inspired violence - has, wait for it, set up an expat branch in Spain.

"This is a party that is fundamentally about hating immigrants," he explained to his Danish audience. "So this latest development was a bit of a surprise."

I caught him later and he explained that he'd heard about the irony-free expat branch on tour to Barcelona a month or so ago.

"It crossed my radar on Twitter, where I follow a few anti-EDL accounts. The thing is that you can tell this story in Barcelona and you can tell it in Sweden and everyone will think it's hilarious. And yet the EDL don't see the inherent lunacy of having an expat branch. It shows them up for the humourless idiots they are."

Still, it gives the rest of us a chuckle.

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Admiral Fallow experience some exchange rate difficulties at Tonder festival - and a princess

I'm in Denmark, for the Tonder festival - which is pronounced "Tonner" apparently - and got here via Hamburg airport and a festival mini bus which, apart from me and my rucksack, also contained Kate Rusby and band, Admiral Fallow and a cool box containing beer. Just the facts.

In between noticing that southern Denmark, against expectations, bears a strong resemblance to Lincolnshire, the time simply flew by. 

"I only realised Denmark isn't in the euro a couple of days ago," I admitted. "I need to find a cash point as soon as we get there."

"Yes," said Joe Rattray, bass player for Admiral Fallow. "We've had some issues with that. Our manager sorted out the PDs - per diems - yesterday and he came bouncing in saying 'I've got €750 here.'"

Denmark isn't in the euro.

"There was this awkward silence before someone pointed out his mistake. In fact, if you retell this story can you say it happened to Lau instead? It's OK though: there's a guy backstage who's changing the money for us."

Other news from Tonder includes that the festival's patron - a princess, no less - will be arriving today. Since this is the Danish royal family - which takes a different approach to monarchy to our lot - it's not entirely surprising that one of them should be a folky. Apparently she was French originally and married the younger of the two Danish princes. I've been told that if I run into her I should ask about her brother-in-law, the Crown Prince, who successfully completed an Iron Man competition last weekend. Honestly, I'm not making this up...

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More Like Trees and Band of Horses at Green Man

There was a moment at Green Man, sitting on a bale of straw outside a beer tent in the sunshine, when a bubble from a stall quite a long way away that seemed entirely devoted to blowing them, landed directly in front of us and burst, leading to the smoke that unexpectedly turned out to be filling it breaking in little crawling waves over the grass. I was sitting with a friend and when it was over we just looked at each other, slightly amazed, then looked around, only to see that the lady sitting on the next bale along had also seen it and was also amazed. We all sat there for a little while looking mildly amazed at each other.

Green Man was full of these kinds of episodes: more than any other festival I've been to, it was visually spectacular, as much in the detail - a night time parade of girls with umbrellas lit like blue phosphorescent jellyfish, the quality of the programming in the Einstein science garden where among other things there was a demonstration of a technology called Mogees - as the bigger picture.  From the grounds of the Glanusk estate themselves, which have a beautiful natural arena that could have been landscaped with a music festival in mind; to the mountain stage that seems to crop out of the ground itself, echoing the shape of the peak behind it; to the enormous green man statue inside which festival-goers were encouraged to tie labels with their wishes written on them for burning on the last night ("Don't climb into the green man!" I wanted to tell the people doing exactly that. "Haven't you seen the movie about his wicker friend?") there was just nothing ordinary about the place. Even the rain felt sweet.

And then, inevitably, there was the mobile phone relay station, clearly visible on the mountainside above, quietly letting the proceedings down by failing to cope with the heavy 3G traffic: it failed after six hours on the Thursday and it would have been in keeping if it had exploded spectacularly as 10,000 people gazed in its general direction over the main stage. The festival wifi also conked out. Just saying: one day in the not-too-distant future, the technology will catch up with us and we will take it for granted. I, for one, am looking forward to that day.

Musically there were a couple of things that stood out for me. I'd only heard of Band of Horses before this weekend - I realise I'm coming late to this one - and they said something during their set that suggested they're not used to headlining festivals. This was almost certainly modesty - the evidence suggested otherwise - but either way they were wonderful: a proper rock band making the noises of the southern USA. They were in turns anthemic, harmonising and complex but never less than uplifting. Bliss.

And then on the Sunday afternoon in the Chai Wallah tent at the top of the site there were this lot - More Like Trees - who seemed to come out of nowhere (London, in fact, via New Zealand) but had me heading for the guy with the CDs in his canvas shoulder bag after two tunes.

One of them played flamenco guitar against the most unlikely accompaniment and wore a tin hat that could have come straight out of Mash or Catch 22 - let's call him Guitarian, though his name actually turned out to be Joshua Whitehouse. Afterwards I asked him "You're more like trees than what?" and got this answer: "We're more like trees than leaves. Leaves fall from the branches and have no responsibility to the place they came from. Whereas we are more like the trees themselves. We're very rooted." He clenched his fists and made a hunkering down gesture, acting what he meant.

They were entrancing. The festival was magic. My heart aches for it already in a way that only the mild exhaustion of several nights under canvas can produce.

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James Findlay on War Horse's Common Man - or Woman

Sitting on the grass in the sunshine at Warwick folk fest the other week, one eye on what the sky was doing - the previous night there had been a torrential downpour - I had an interesting chat with James Findlay.

I had thought I wanted to ask him about the Jon Boden opera he's involved in, which is called Little Musgrave, is based on the Matty Groves story and which I believe has its premiere today. However, the conversation soon turned to War Horse, which Findlay has also had a brush with.

"I was invited to take part in some workshops at the South Bank Centre, which were for the casting," he said. "It was a really interesting, fun week. John Tams had invited me but there were some other pretty well-known folk musicians there are well, including Nancy Kerr, doing workshops and groups.

"At the end of the week John offered me the role of the Common Man in the show." The role has also been taken by Tim van Eyken, Saul Rose and - currently - Dogan Mehmet and Ben Murray. "But, from my point of view, the trouble was that it would have involved committing to it for two whole years. And I thought that I'm not really well-known enough on the folk scene to go away for two whole years without everyone forgetting who I was. So I had to say no.

"But interestingly there were a couple of women in the workshops - younger female folk musicians - who were also in the running for the role. So they'd definitely have a woman in that part and I can't see anything wrong in that. Women suffered through the first world war, just as the men did. They may not have been doing much of the killing or dying but there's more than one kind of suffering. They lost husbands, brothers and fathers."

To say nothing of the generation of women who lost their chance of a family as a  result of there being too few men to go around.

"The part is called the Common Man," said Findlay. "But it could just as easily be The Common Woman."

* If you're interested in War Horse you might also like this post, which is about the making of the film with Stephen Spielberg and Richard Curtis.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley