Nancy Kerr: never underestimate Towersey's sweetest visitor

Not enough women hear themselves called geniuses. A lot would be embarrassed: as a group we're most often brought up to believe that modesty is the way forward, to having our triumphs mitigated and our disasters emphasised while, for the most part, being rewarded less fully than our brothers, underestimated at the outset and frequently discounted in the final reckoning. This is not something I would have written twenty years ago or something I was brought up to believe: it's something I've learnt.

Part of me wishes I could un-know it.

But Nancy Kerr brings the discomfort of this under-acknowledged truth into sharp focus. If the definition of a genius involves exceptional creativity resulting in a leap of insight, ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have a contender: no blushing, if it's all the same to you.

One of the UK's finest original folk albums of recent years has been Twice Reflected Sun by Kerr and her husband, James Fagan, for the explosive impact of the songwriting and its strong sense of two places - England and Australia. Kerr is English while Fagan, of course, is an Aussie. It was rightly honoured by the Radio 2 folk awards and has several songs on it that feel as if they will outlive us all. Kerr and Fagan each have a voice you would be able to tell from anyone else's, which multiplies their distinctiveness as a duo by several powers of magnitude. Couple this with Kerr's ability to play both ends of a fiddle simultaneously - drawing the bow with one hand while plucking with the other - and they're a proposition of unique and powerful singularity.

I came to the album - and Queen of Waters, above, about a canal boat - about three years ago at the Warwick festival, and loved it a lot, immediately. At the time Kerr could herself have been the Queen of Waters, so heavily pregnant was she, and Fagan left an indelible impression as a result of an overwrought and highly memorable conversation (for me, anyway) after the gig during which I was buying a copy of their CD and he was giving off static, jangling with nerves and anticipating the imminent arrival of their second child. He might be medically trained but when it's your own family I guess all bets are off. 

I saw Kerr play again this year at Folk by the Oak, as a part of The Elizabethan Session, and received a copy of her wonderful first solo album, Sweet Visitor, soon afterwards through the post, which I absorbed walking to and from work for several days. One particular thought jostled to the front, sat up and begged for attention though: while this was Kerr's solo debut it was not a departure from Twice Reflected Sun; the brilliant continuities and lyrical consistencies were far greater than the differences. Why was that?

"I also wrote all the songs on Twice Reflected Sun," Kerr nodded. We were perched on a sofa in a green room behind the CD tent at the Towersey festival and I was not-very-discreetly delighted by the significance of what she had just said.

Not that it had been a secret. Had I paid greater attention, the information was out there. But because several of the songs on Twice Reflected Sun were written in a male - even martial - voice, I had made sexist assumptions about the division of labour between the two of them - she and Fagan  - that were, quite simply, wrong. And that, I suppose, is how it all starts...


"That album really uncorked me as far as song-writing goes," said Kerr. "It was the first one I ever wrote and I was consciously doing some songs for me to sing and some for James. Sweet Visitor came about because James told me to sing them all, like other singer-songwriters. For Twice Reflected Sun I was trying to write in the way that the tradition behaves: it was quite abstract. And I think that's the case because folk songs trickle down through so many filters. The old ballads might tell a personal story but the proponent has often been lost, so the singer-songwriter becomes a very powerful agency."

It should be more widely known that you're the writer, I suggested, with all the leaps of imagination implied by that. She smiled wryly.

"A good friend said to me after he'd listened to Twice Reflected Sun 'Is that all going on in your head?' And it tickled me because it was just an inch away from 'your pretty little head'. But my mum is a songwriter and I grew up listening to Peggy Seeger's songs about being female. This gender thing can be quite subtle. You often get a man telling women's stories and it's an interesting perspective: the messages get altered when you give them a different context."

Sweet Visitor has a lot on it about London 2012?

"Yes. Radio Two commissioned me to write three songs about the Olympics, though the theme was a bit bothersome to me. I wasn't sure how to find my part in it. I'm not sporty and my writing is all about mood. Also a lot of folk relies on jeopardy, adversity and hard times, which is kind of the opposite to what the Olympics was about. But in the end I thought of my grandparents, who were from the East End, and I thought about the cost of this incredible event in their lives, then wrote about the Greek gods coming to the East End, all golden."

I love the folk rock track on there called The Bunting and the Crown: it pounds along a little bit like an early Steeleye Span track.

"It's about competition and how a lot of things come down to nationalism: I dwell a lot on music and identity, and nationalism is about power and a sense of power. But if someone's personal sense of power is derived from their country being better than someone else's I'm not interested. The Bunting and the Crown is about that not being important... I do like bunting though."

She giggled. It was infectious.

"But the main thing about these songs was that someone asked me to write them. It was a very big deal and the deadlines helped."

I hear you.

"I need deadlines. Your brain gets refreshed by them. I love a deadline and I have learned to make my own: if I say to James 'can you take the kids out for two hours?' I have to have a song by the end of it. After the Olympics, I wrote Sweet Visitor as if someone had commissioned it and then you could say that I was match-fit for The Elizabethan Session.

"There is a slight subtext to Sweet Visitor, which is that we are all visitors. At a time when there are a lot of questions about nations, heritage and where you are from - people fleeing terrible countries, trying to escape risk - if we realise that we are all where we are by the grace of coincidence or fate, that should make us behave better to each other."

When I'd told a friend I was hoping to catch you for an interview here, he said he thought you were Australian.

"I've spent a lot of my life in Australia," she said, her often deliciously flat vowels getting a twang for the occasion. "I get that whole emigrant experience. Where The Jacarandas Grow (from Sweet Visitor) is about asylum seekers in Australia and how a pretty wealthy country has closed itself off to humanitarian concerns."

Interesting. I saw a thing on TV recently about the British "orphans" who were sent there in the 50s and 60s, around 180,000 of them – and lots hadn't actually lost their parents: they were taken away from poor families, exported and then horribly brutalised in corrupt institutions, lots of them run by nuns and priests. Australia's got a small population and perhaps to have so many people to whom that happened so recently - a substantial portion of a generation - I was wondering whether it would have an effect on a country's public discourse as well as its family life?

"Maybe. We played a folk festival at a place called Fairbridge on one of those old sites – the institutions - south of Perth. It had a very peculiar atmosphere.

"James and I met in the UK, though, back in 1995. He was a medical doctor at the time and when he went back for his first year of being fully qualified I went with him. We split our time between Britain and Australia for several years: it was a constant round of festival summers on two sides of the world. So I do feel quite Australian and I got to really love the music scene there.

"It's not as easy for us to go back now that we have heaps and heaps of work, but we will at some point, when it fits in with schooling. We sing in a five-piece when we're there, with James's sister and his mum and dad, Bob and Margaret."

I wondered about the vast distance between England and Australia and the people whose lives are shaped by both places.

"It was really cool meeting James and realising how much we had in common, our backgrounds and references. I sometimes wonder how people make connections without music as an opener: there's a certain amount that's understood, that doesn't need to be said. I mean, I've been playing the fiddle since I was five. And I don't really know how to hold my bow properly, but it works for me. I'm really interested in the texture and the colour of the sound it makes: I like the little scrapes and growls and even if you are just playing one note, I love how you can change the tone. I'm an accompanist as much as anything."

I once had a chat with Kathryn Roberts in which she'd said something about her husband and musical partner, Sean, that I'd misunderstood at the time. She'd said that he was at his best as an accompanist and, in my ignorance, it had crossed my mind this might have been a slight. Later I realised the opposite was true. Without collaboration music amounts to very little.

Kerr nodded.

"I like accompanying but it's hard then being a leader. When you're accompanying you have to put any ego away for a bit and play differently... but there is a lot of power in supporting something properly. That's why I love working with James: he knows where to pitch what he is doing. He doesn't just think about the notes, he thinks about the rhythm and the notes and about telling a story all at the same time. That's what I love in his music: with the right accompanist we can do anything."

I really wanted to ask this next thing because the song sets my imagination ablaze: I Am The Fox, from Twice Reflected Sun, was written for James's voice (though it was also served up convincingly as hard rock at a dreamlike late-night Towersey ceilidh by Fagan's excellent "metalcore dance band" The Glorystrokes). What alchemy could possibly have produced that slice of lyrical subversion?

"It was the cusp of the financial crash and for about ten minutes I thought maybe it was payback for capitalism... That was before I realised that the crap always trickles down and there were difficult times ahead. I thought that for once in my life, being a folk musician was not a ridiculous choice. The character in that song was partly Fantastic Mr Fox, Robin Hood and Reynardine. I thought that if you can't make money on the stock market then you might as well write songs about it."

I asked whether Now is the Time, from the new album, was a reference to John Ball, whose rallying cry those words were: I thought she might know this because the song about him by Sydney Carter is a part of The Melrose Quartet's set - the group being Kerr and Fagan's collaboration with fellow Sheffielders Jess and Richard Arrowsmith. In fact, Kerr said it was coincidence, that the song had been written about someone else. But she seemed very taken by what was evidently new information to her (about the rallying cry). I probably glowed a little when she mentioned my question while introducing the song at her album launch later.

Sophie Parkes' biography of Eliza Carthy, Wayward Daughter, is partly about how the two of you played music together as teenagers. Will there be a reunion?

"I don't think Eliza and I will work together in the future," she said, somewhat to my surprise. "There's something about identity in music: we were two women of exactly the same age. We don't sound similar, but we both sing and play fiddle, and people compared us with each other. It's very hard to be compared: I don't want to be compared to anyone. I found it hard back then: she was so successful so quickly."

That has an irrefutable emotional logic to it. In any case, I cannot resist the thought that, for Kerr at least, the time is now.

* Also from Towersey 2014 there is this, about Blair Dunlop believing that he invented determinism, this about Dunlop's dad, Ashley Hutchings, and the forthcoming film about his former wife, the folk singer Shirley Collins, and this short thing about Lau.

* 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 at @emma1hartley

Geoff Lakeman: folk patriarch and newspaper man

I'm sure he doesn't remember, but I met Geoff Lakeman - father of Sean, Sam and Seth - when I was a trainee reporter working out of the Bodmin office of the Western Morning News. There had been a huge drugs bust - some entrepreneurial soul had been growing acres of marijuana in poly-tunnels somewhere near Padstow - and the police were so proud of themselves that somewhat against the grain they'd invited us all down to have a look - and a sniff (it was powerful strong-smelling stuff, my lover). Geoff, the Daily Mirror's westcountry reporter, was working out of the back of his car using one of those enormous mobile telephones that resembled a brick. This was still practically science fiction in 1996 and left an ineradicable impression on my young mind.

"I was made redundant about eight years ago," he says on the telephone from his Dartmoor home, sounding genuinely like a man with no outstanding issues relating to that event. "They paid me to go away after 28 years on staff, which I wasn't complaining about, and then continued to pay me for another seven years while I freelanced for them. Stupid isn't it? After the Maxwell robbery the unions and company had to pursue about 40 different civil court cases around the world and got back about half of the missing £800 million that he half-inched. My pension, I'm relieved to say, is intact... for now."

Lakeman has led an enviable double life. As well as holding down a high-pressure full-time job on a national newspaper, he has also been a folk musician and is these days the patriarch of something akin to a musical dynasty. His three sons and their extended family are a mini Who's Who of the folk world: Seth has been nominated for a Mercury award, Sam is married to Cara Dillon, Sean to Kathryn Roberts, Kathryn's brother Jamie was up against her for a folk award this year... The list goes on. "In fact, the only member of the family who doesn't sing or play is Hannah, Seth's wife. She's a nurse," he said.

It's astonishing to me that that Geoff has had the time and energy to do both things - journalism and music - as his chosen trade is notoriously demanding all on its own. I remember whispers of his alternative existence among my colleagues at the WMN, which gave him something like local hero status in the office.

"But I don't think many people on the folk scene knew I was a journalist, even when I was on the Telegraph," he ruminated. There must have been some clashes between his two worlds, though? "Horrendous. Joy and I would be doing evening gigs, when I had already done a full day's work, and I would be paged. I'd have to rush off stage at half time, call the coastguards and police about some dramatic rescue happening 100 miles off Land's End, file the story by phone to a copytaker and then go back on stage to perform the second half.

"My worst experience was doing a lovely set at Dartmoor folk festival - in the middle of nowhere, where there was no pager signal (this was pre-mobiles). We started driving home in a leisurely fashion, only to be contacted by the office to say that Simon le Bon and his crew were upside down in their yacht after capsizing somewhere off the Cornish coast. So I drove like a maniac straight to west Cornwall to chase le Bon, who had been rescued by this time, only to have him, his wife and crew members promptly jump out of a hotel window to avoid me! Never liked his music anyway - although I used to play folk with his auntie in Cheddar. Christ... this is a load of old piffle, isn't it? God knows what you, or the rest of the world, will make of it."

Maybe go back to the beginning?

"I'm a Cornishman," he explained. "I was born in Penzance and brought up in Newlyn. I left school at 16 and became a cub reporter but grew up to the sound of male voice choirs. My mum went to school with Brenda Wootton and I used to take her daughter out.

"I eventually moved away and got a job at a news agency near Heathrow airport and then moved on to the Press Association, on Fleet Street. It was while I was there that Joy and I married - she was a teacher then. We got involved with the Herga folk club in Harrow, organising and playing, and there was this period when I was going off for PA for a month at a time, dodging bombs and bullets in Northern Ireland during the worst of the Troubles. Then I would come home and help out with the folk club: we'd be putting up Martin Carthy,  Dave Swarbrick... Peggy Seeger was sometimes around. So I had this strange double life.

"When I left PA I helped start LBC and was one of the first two independent radio reporters. I took a young Jon Snow on his first trip out of the office and eventually introduced him to some musicians in Northern Ireland. My time in Ireland meant that when Sam married Cara Dillon I already had all these Irish music connections lurking around in my past... It was the Telegraph that said would I come back down to the Westcountry?

"So we moved to Bristol, where we became regular players at several clubs in the city. And I'd been at the Telegraph for three years when I was poached by the Mirror."

Nice.

"We moved to Devon - to the village where we are now - and I just stayed with the Mirror. As soon as we arrived, various clubs were giving us bookings and in particular there was a Plymouth club called The Navy which was really good. Floor singers would have to book two weeks in advance if they wanted to get a slot. At that point Joy and I started having children."

Right. The kids.

"The three of them definitely chose their own instruments. Joy is a very talented violinist and probably that propelled Seth towards the fiddle. Sean definitely wanted to play guitar and then Sam took up the keyboards. Joy taught Seth the rudiments and then sent him to a teacher as he got a bit older. But we were still running folk clubs at that stage, so once a week we'd come home - even during their holidays and half terms - with musicians. So the boys were used to being around The Oyster Band, Peter Bellamy, Tom McConnville and Chris Newman. They were learning their instruments but also learning how to be musicians by a process of osmosis.

"We had a family band..."

With a hint of impishness, he's provided this picture of The Lakeman Family Band, taken during a performance at the Who'd Have Thought It folk club in Milton Coombe in about 1990. 

This would make Sean, right, about 14, Sam, left, 12, and Seth, in the middle, 10 or 11. Ain't parents grand? That's Joy with the fiddle and Geoff at the back with the squeezebox: not that there's any mistaking who the daddy is in this picture. Uncanny resemblance, eh?

"Once we went on holiday with Chris Newman," Geoff continued. "I still think he's one of the best six-string guitarists in the country. Anyway, we would all go busking together on this holiday in France, so the boys were picking up some stuff that would be useful. Plus we used to make quite a bit of money...

"Then when they got to their early teens they started performing together as The Lakeman Brothers and at that stage we just let them have their own musical lives. Joy and I went on holiday without them once - we left Sean in charge because he was old enough - and when we came back they'd used this little recording studio we had in the house and made their first CD together, which was called Three Piece Suite.  

"I'd imagine it's a bit of a collectors' item now as it had all their own original music on there. They'd got Kathryn Roberts in to do some vocals but it was mainly instrumental. Seth wasn't singing at that time."

 

We had a brief discussion about whether it would be possible to upload some of the CD, which Geoff has a copy of at home, to Soundcloud so I could put a link on here. But the upshot was that the copyright of their early music is complicated these days and uploading it may make a rod for someone's back. Anyone know whether Three Piece Suite is available for listening to on the net?

"The CD got played on the radio and attracted some good reviews, enough to get them some slots at festivals. Then they met Kate Rusby and it all went a bit bonkers for a few years when they formed Equation. The rest is history, more or less."

 

He was off in a minute to play at the wake of someone he'd known as Dave the Heckler, he said, at the request of the guy's family. "Seth and Sean, who live in the next village along, have just flown off to Australia to play festivals for a month and I'm looking forward to playing a gig on Saturday at the Peter Tavy village hall nearby with Speakeasy, an old-timey jazz band I'm in."

 

I asked about the move between the Telegraph and the Daily Mirror all those years ago, provoking a profession of greater comfort at the left-wing paper. "I've always been a socialist and the Telegraph at that time was an arch Tory paper - these days it's just full of the crowd from the Daily Mail, isn't it? It was very much 'And will Mr Lakeman be writing today?' when I was there."

In fact, what I'd been wondering about was the difference between writing for a broadsheet and a tabloid? "The thing I was most grateful for after the move to the Mirror was that it didn't half hone my writing style. I became a far better writer, having to precis stuff down."

And what's he been making of the Leveson inquiry? Some of my thoughts are set out here.

"I've had the luxury of sitting through some of it in real time on TV and it seems to have got bogged down now with a whole load of irrelevant stuff... The money that changed hands: that was shocking. It's tempting to think that I'm being naive about it all - but then again I wouldn't have survived at the Mirror as long as I did if I were. But I had no knowledge of that kind of dirty dealing during the course of my life in journalism. 

"Phone hacking? I didn't have to. I was best friends with the chief superintendent of the local police force. When you went out on a job you banged on doors and within ten minutes people would tell you who you needed to speak to. I didn't have to go around hacking phones because if you have your contacts you can find out what you need to know. 

"I don't think many people I know could have been involved. I mean, you can't work for 48 years in journalism and be naive." This thought clearly haunts him. "And yet some of these things I have found shocking. I was disgusted by the venality and the sheer laziness of it all. 'I can't be bothered to get off my arse and talk to people, so I'll sit here and hack phones and eavesdrop instead.'" There was revulsion in his voice. 

"They've tried to smear and besmirch the Mirror, haven't they?" Well, I replied, Piers Morgan has certainly drawn attention to the paper by boasting, weirdly, how much he knew about phone hacking. "But they haven't come up with the stuff, have they? I don't see exactly why everyone else has been tarred with the same brush as News International. I'm almost glad to be out of it. I mean, I've had a fantastic career but it's moved on in such a way that I'm just glad I'm out of it now. I can immerse myself in music without worrying about having to make a living.

"Oh look!" he said suddenly. "Nic Jones is walking past the window." Jones lives in the same village as Geoff and Joy and I got the sense that Geoff was waving at him through the window. "I taught him to play the spoons, you know, but he's yet to do that at any of his gigs. I take him to the folk club in Bodmin, and to Totnes and Liskeard. He loves going and people love to see him. I call him 'The Nick Drake who didn't die'. "

Righto. I expect he loves that, does he?

"If Nic hadn't had his accident I think he would have just gone off like Richard Thompson and Ry Cooder: wouldn't have stuck with the folk so much. He's a big Radiohead fan, which tells you a lot about the kind of music he likes."

Trust a newspaper man to change the subject. I'm reminded nonetheless of an interview I did with Kathryn Roberts at the Bristol festival a couple of years ago during which she described her husband Sean's great strength as his ability to be supportive of others, musically and otherwise, something that impressed me more the longer I thought about it. I wonder now whether he gets it from his dad? Geoff Lakeman certainly appears to have done something right.

* 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

The Bristol folk festival at Colston Hall

Not knowing Bristol, I'd imagined a red brick stately home built by a prosperous slave trader back in the day. In fact Colston Hall is a glass-fronted building with a municipal feel, built high into the air in a part of town full of squats, financial services outlets and fast food joints. But it was easily identifiable as folk central from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening by the morris men and rapper dancers making the most of the sunshine out the front. These included Nonesuch Morris - Best in Class for leaping - and the Silver Flame Rapper girls, who were exciting because of the worried look they habitually wore with their purple sashes, giving the impression - nearly entirely erroneously, as it turned out - that something could go wrong at any minute. Always a concern with jiggling flesh in close proximity to swords.

Being indoors this early in the year had theoretical advantages, although sunshine and light breezes in the end gave the two dark, main venues the feel of places to which you regretfully retreated when compelled indoors by the need to hear some music. The walk through the foyer was brightened by an on-trend novelty pedicure station, involving hundreds of little fish nibbling at your hard skin for a tenner.

There were squeals from it on Friday because it tickled (apparently). But by the end of the three days the poor little fishies had taken to laying low in the bottom of their tanks, bloated, torpid and probably a bit cheesed off with the formerly be-sandalled feet of hundreds of folkies. Definitely rather them than me. Several friends who were indoor camping in a nearby church hall ("but where do you put the tent pegs?") with just a sink for washing were considering treating themselves and the fish to a full body immersion by Sunday though, so perhaps the fishies got off lightly.

Kathryn Roberts and her partner Sean Lakeman played a lovely set of sad tunes early on Friday afternoon. "Do we ever play anything else?" asked Roberts at one point. She later explained their musical choices to me in a way that reminded me that I sometimes used to meet Sean's dad, Geoff, on jobs when I was a cub reporter in Cornwall and he was the Daily Mirror's man in the west country. "So much of folk music is the news of the time when it was written - songs about events with a newsworthy sensation. As a result they are very often sad. I suppose we celebrate the joyous things but don't necessarily write songs about them. And I live such a happy life that it's a kind of therapy to get out and do something else."

But with Lakeman being an ace rhythm guitarist, could there be a missed opportunity for upbeat, rabble-rousing numbers? "Sean does a lot of rhythm guitar with Seth (Lakeman, his brother) but he's primarily an excellent accompanist. It's just a different style for him."

In the innumerate tradition of Fun Boy Three, the first thing you noticed about 3 Daft Monkeys was that there were four of them, or five if you included Athene Roberts' amazing, steam punk corsetry (see above). They almost magically lifted the mood and caused the first sighting of punters galloping up and down the aisles in each others' arms. When Roberts said "You're a lovely audience, yes you are" it was as if a pixie were tickling us under our collective chins.

The evening continued with Ruarri Joseph, who was funny as well as good and had a memorable line about an unlucky man whose dog had been "snagged by a train and was ten miles east". And then Seth Lakeman, who raised the audience to such a pitch that one of my companions was moved to observe that it was almost certainly the excess of female hormones in the air that was making his fiddle strings go out of tune.

However, in the interest of balance I would like to point out that despite the legend that Lakeman is "making folk sexy" I thought I observed an equal reaction to Fay Hield on Sunday afternoon, something that struck me as I failed to see through the forest of burly admirers crowding the front of her auditorium. She got a supportive yet faintly yearning audience response to her suggestion that, since she'd failed to bag Prince William after all, she wouldn't mind if "that Mr Boden" asked for her hand now...

Friday evening was also when I realised that there was behaviour around the bar that was, in my experience, unique to folk gatherings. Never in my life, apart from at Bristol this weekend and the South Bank Centre once for a folk show, have I seen people spontaneously form a number of queues for the bar equal to the number of bar staff. This was instead of the more traditional scrum. While I can see that there is something irritatingly fair about this, it also takes much of the romance out of the situation, which is - let's face it - something that most of us have been in training for all of our lives. It negates the possibility of small acts of kindness, the idea that someone might be thirstier than someone else and takes all of the risk out of a situation that most of us have absolutely no problem with in the first place. It then replaces this tiny risk of unfairness with the kind of irritation more usually experienced in a post office when one queue appears to be moving faster than another. Plus it takes up much more space. Gah... I can feel a backlash coming on.

Saturday morning brought a young, male trio called Wildflowers, who were two fiddles and a Spanish-flavoured guitar with a combined age of about 40. They were very, very good for their ages, putting the wild into wildflower. I was intending to make a series of observations about them, starting with the idea that they would be a perfect match for Joe Broughton's violin masterclasses at the Birmingham Conservatoire or the Guildhall school because of the style in which they play (similar to his with the Urban Folk Quartet but less practised by about 20 years). But I've decided to stop there because someone saw me jotting notes and came over, asking who I was writing for and mentioning that he was father to one of them. And I know when I'm licked.

Jane Taylor was brilliant and gave me my first "got to buy a CD" moment, but I'm going to write about her separately. And she was followed, with a sense of the occasion having picked up some strong momentum, by Pilgrims' Way - "we're the only band who won't try and sell you something this weekend because our first CD's not printed until next week", count me in - and then Jamie Smith's Mabon. While "mabon" produces nothing from my dictionary, wikipedia says that it's the autumnal equinox in the Wiccan tradition, when you can traditionally balance an egg on its end. Not sure what to make of that, but they also got my vote with a CD.

Elfynn reminded me a lot of Little Johnny England with a female singer. Then there was the Fisherman's Friends, who said that they'd landed the "old farts novelty slot" at Glastonbury this year but left me, as usual, with the feeling that I always had after meeting Cornish lifeboat crews (more cub reporter anecdotes): that somehow I'd had the wool pulled over my eyes by someone more canny than me. 

One-time Irish Eurovision contenders Dervish were hilarious but made Boots of Spanish Leather sound like incidental music from Titanic. And then Steve Knightley, Phil Beer and Miranda Sykes did their impressive thing, made me blub to Cousin Jack and then sent us off to the silent disco over the way, where we discovered all over again that Jim Moray is a genius. On this occasion it was because he mashed up Billy Jean by Michael Jackson with Seth Lakeman's Kitty Jay in such a way that it was clear they should have met sooner and will undoubtedly spend the rest of their lives together, curled up in some kind of funky Bristolian love nest.

My Sunday got off to a slow start because I was talked into getting up at 5am to go and watch several troupes of suprisingly alert morris dancers dance the sun up by Cabot tower for May Day, and then had to go back to bed again with exhaustion (me - probably not them), grateful that someone had the situation in hand.

However, memorable parts of the day eventually included being asked to judge a poetry folk slam, a role I believe I was born for; seeing a magician rightly called Kieran the Mighty produce pre-marked playing cards from the inside of a mobile phone in the terrace bar and shocked expressions on the faces of his audience; and deciding that there must have been something wrong with Sheelanagig's sound desk because their set was SO LOUD it made me quite scared, to the point at which I broke out in a sweat and had to leave the auditorium. Their flute sounded like nothing except feedback and the amplification meant I couldn't understand a word spoken between songs, which just made me feel old. But they had to contend with a gigantic banner picture of Bellowhead louching around behind them, so perhaps I should cut them some slack.

When Bellowhead finally arrived they were phenomenal. A pleasantly unhinged Jon Boden bashed his tambourine against his chest, giving the impression that he was only a very short trip from banging it on his forehead. There was a song enigmatically introduced by Paul Sartin as being about "wizard copulation"; they did Across the Line, which they don't always play but is my personal favourite; and when Cholera Camp came around complete f****** chaos broke out. Pete Flood was running around the stage apparently looking for his snare drum and either found it just in time, or made it look as if he had. Boden threw his jacket in the air, which after all the songs about whoring gave the impression he might be about to take the rest off it off too, and at the end of the set there were cannons shooting what looked like glitter in the air, at which point even the band looked amazed. There was a short debate afterwards about whether any of us really enjoyed Little Sally Racket as much as Boden clearly enjoyed singing it. But hey, I shouldn't think they care after a performance like that.

Folky Bristolian youngsters carried on singing, playing and dancing in the bar afterwards until the staff threw everyone out. I think it would be fair to say that a good time was had by all, with the possible exception of the nibbling fishes.

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