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

American bloke runs off with Steve Knightley's guitar

More than halfway through his set for the Green Note at The Old Queen's Head on Monday night, Richard Shindell said: "I would like to thank Steve Knightley for the loan of his guitar. He was supposed to bring my CDs from his shed to my gig in Wiltshire yesterday: he was supposed to bring them to the festival that I came from this morning.

"And he didn't.

"And he felt so badly about it that I felt bad for him for feeling so bad. We both felt very bad.

"So I gave him the opportunity to redeem himself. I said 'lend me your guitar for two weeks'."

Shindell, you see, lives in Argentina and for some reason or other had not brought an acoustic guitar with him despite it being his instrument of choice.

"And Steve said," with rising intonation, as one pleading for it not to be the case, "'Really?'

"I got a text message from Steve Knightley just before I came on stage. I was afraid it would say something like 'Don't use my guitar tonight'.

"So I didn't read it."

Ha!

* The pictures on this blog were taken by the very talented David Firn, who could be reached here, if you were interested in his work.

* Richard Shindell pays for Tardis to orbit the Earth

* If you thought these posts were good you might also enjoy this interview with Shindell I made earlier.

* 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

Richard Shindell pays for Doctor Who's Tardis to orbit the Earth

It's the time of year when this blog likes to do a story about a satellite. Fortunately Richard Shindell has stepped into the breach.

At The Old Queen's Head in Islington, where he was doing a Green Note gig last night, he asked whether there were any Doctor Who fans in the house and, after receiving a slightly muted response from an audience of folkies wary of being hailed as geeks, explained that he was one himself, as is his daughter.

"Did you know that there's a project on Kickstarter to send an actual functioning satellite into space in the shape of the Tardis?" he asked.

"I've donated $300 because that's the threshold above which you get all kinds of loot: T-shirts, a blueprint of the satellite and - best of all - five megabytes of space on the Tardis's hard drive. I'm going to upload this song of mine about satellites. I'm going to do this because it's an excellent use of $300."

It's hard to disagree.

* American bloke runs off with Steve Knightley's guitar

* If you thought this post was good you might also enjoy this interview with Shindell I made earlier.

* This story regenerated and landed on the surface of the Guardian newspaper.

* 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

From Good Stock by Tandem, at the Warwick folk festival

Earlier this week a CD slid on to the mat at The Glamour Cave that soon began a career on my stereo, making end-to-end appearances. It's a debut and when I found the band in question was going to be at the Warwick folk festival I resisted posting about it then and there, thinking that it might be a bit more interesting if I waited until after I'd met them.

Tandem are a three piece - Dave Malkin on guitar (centre), Charlie Pell (right) on fiddle and sampler Ben Corrigan - although they've been presenting at Warwick as an acoustic two-piece: they'll be playing live with Ben later on this summer.

Initially they reminded me of Lau, but with interesting vocals - which identify them as being not from Scotland despite early indications to the contrary - and sudden excursions into a world of digital noise that seem not at all out of place despite the traditional sound it's built around.



It turns out the Lau-ishness is not a coincidence, as they once supported Lau.

However, they're young - in their early twenties - and Dave is finishing at Trinity music school in the old naval hospital in Greenwich imminently. When I saw them on Friday, sweating it out in temperatures that must have been soaring towards the high 80s on the Plaza stage, which is basically a concrete playground, they happened to mention that they should have met each other much earlier than they actually did.

"I had grandparents on my mother's side who were extremely eccentric," said Dave, over a moderate amount of luminous orange hallucinagenic cider. "They amassed a huge collection of mechanical organ instruments. They had two fairground organs, one of which we sampled for the album, a whole load of music boxes and gramophones, and about 7,000 shellac records. When they died I got the lot.

"Charlie's father is the last remaining mechanical organ builder in the country and he'd done some work for my grandad.

"Then my father's side of the family are publicans and their pub, in Whaplode Drove, was three doors up from Charlie's house. But we never met - and it gets weirder.

"We were at school together and still didn't meet: we were both at Spalding grammar school in Lincolnshire and Charlie was a couple of years above me."

A school concert after Charlie had already left eventually provided a catalyst for their musical relationship. These days they're both in London and had the album launch the Cutty Sark pub in Greenwich the other day. However, Charlie's family interest in steam gives him a legacy that could turn out to be useful for music festivals.

"We've got an enormous caravan that the whole family can fit in and we used to go out together to steam fairs and the like: until you've seen the Great Dorset Steam Fair you haven't lived. On the last night they get all the traction engines in a massive line and they toot their horns at midnight. I believe it's bigger than Glastonbury."

And it may have been the hallucinogenic cider but when I asked Charlie to draw a diagram of the caravan he did...

From Good Stock is a subtle, intriguing and melodic debut. I'd urge you to have a listen.

* You can buy the album here.

* 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

Josienne's mystery man makes an appearance at Fire and Fortune launch

The launch of Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker's wonderful Fire & Fortune at The Forge in Camden last night was one of those evenings with a little bit of magic about it. Not least for the support act, Samantha Whates, who - when she sang harmonies during the main set - had a crystalline voice that could have been Josienne's overdub.

Her own set included something that she said she'd written for Josienne's wedding a year ago. "It doesn't really have a title," she said later. "Although at the moment it's going by I Am A Tree. I always think songs are a bit like pets, in that once you've named them they are truly yours."

Since this one was written for Josienne and her mystery man - who until last night, despite having been to lots, I'd never seen at one of their gigs - I guess that makes sense. Name the song and it will be Samantha's rather than theirs.

"Yes. I am the mystery man, " the mystery man agreed. "I stay in the background and am mysterious. But this suits me in some ways because I can't bear to come to the gigs. I get too emotional listening to Josienne sing. I wish I didn't but unfortunately I do."

On the bright side, when he's overcome by emotion, it might not be immediately apparent to onlookers...

* You can listen to Fire & Fortune here and then - bearing in mind that these early CDs may be worth a bit one day - buy your own copy.

* 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