2005 – The Times review

Cambridge Folk Festival, By David Sinclair Tuesday 2 August 2005

Music Festival don’t come any better organised or relaxed than the 41st Cambridge Folk Festival. Of the 12,000 tickets sold this year, about 2000 were for children, and many of the adults have been coming since they were children themselves. This made for a welcome air of family bustle and leisurely bonhomie.

Actually, there was something going on everywhere you turned. Having opened the day’s proceedings on the main stage, the Appalachian busking band Old Crow Medicine Show put on a superb impromptu performance in a wooded glade for a television show presented by Mark Radcliffe, the Radio 2 DJ.

Radcliffe could later be found singing and playing guitar in the Mojo tent with his group the Family Mahone, a remarkably capable performance which, although leavened with northern humour, was certainly no joke.

Over on Stage two, a succesion of exciting new groups including the Cat Empire, from Australia, the Duhkls, from Canada and the English ten-piece ensemble Bellowhead skillfully imported influences from every point on the popular music compass: funk, rock, soul, jazz, calypso, brass band – you name it. On this evidence, folk music has rarely been in a more vibrant condition, even if it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify.

But whatever it now sounds like, folk is still about telling stories and for most performers this meant adding a tall tale or two between numbers. Jimmy Webb took this practice to new extremes, with several narrative ‘introductions’ that seemed to go on longer than the songs themselves.

One thing he didn’t have to explain was why he continues to be more admired as a song writer than as a performer. Leaden, cabaret versions of his classic compositions By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Wichita Lineman and others, said it all.

Kate Rusby, whose group was augmented by a horn section recruited from the Coldstream Guards, provided a cheerful English folk experience, while Karine Polwart with her band dressed in kilts added a bonny Scottish touch, briefly converting the main stage audience into a vast singing workshop.

Sadly Lucinda Williams had pulled out due to ill health. Her replacement, the Nashville-raised singer Laura Cantrell, supplied an enjoyable set cut from old-school country and western cloth. But it was Mary Gauthier, from Louisiana, who most closely resembled Williams and who was the revelation of the day.

Bluesy and severe, she conjured feelings of intense heartache and images of Southern apocalypse in Sugar Cane, before ending with a rousing Wheel Inside the Wheel.