2008 – Cambridge News Review

Singing in the rain by Nik Shelton Monday 4 August 2008

The old and the new collided at the 44th Cambridge Folk Festival this weekend.

Veteran artists like Judy Collins, Billy Bragg and Joan Armatrading gave the crowds something to cheer about, but more than ever the festival offered a glimpse of folk music’s cutting edge.

Groups like acoustic electronica collective Tunng, Celtic dance group Peatbog Faeries and the new genre-bending musical project The Imagined Village, proved the festival organisers have their ears to the ground and their minds open to the new directions traditional music is taking.

While the event has been blessed in recent years with baking sun and cloudless skies this year their luck changed and umbrellas, raincoats and improvised tarpaulin shelters were always close at hand ready for the next downpour.

The festival kicked off on Thursday with local acoustic rock and rollers The Shivers. It may have been the first set of the festival but it was sadly the last for the band who have decided to call it a day despite a small army of fans and several successful folk festival appearances under their belts.

The opening night also featured one of the most talked about artists of the festival, 18-year-old Laura Marling who produced a collection of gritty acoustic songs which could easily have come from someone far older.

The folk festival got into full swing on Friday when the first act of the day to get everyone on their feet were Nashville family bluegrass band Cherryholmes who offered up a frantic ho-down that was just perfect for getting the Cambridge crowd in the mood.

Michael Talvey, Martin Julia, Gary Wilson and Rob DrydenAlthough often held up as spokesperson for the new generation of folk artists Eliza Carthy’s solo material often stretches its wings in whatever direction inspires her. This is definitely true for her latest album Dreams of Breathing Underwater which sounds like nothing her parents Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson would ever have created.

However the album’s name began to sound a little prophetic when the rainclouds started to gather and despite having the goodwill of the crowd on her side – she is the closest thing the folk festival has to a presiding monarch – she failed to set the stage alight in the same way she has in previous years at Cambridge.

Next up festival regular Michael McGoldrick stepped up just as the rain began to fall. The piper, flute player and former member of Celtic group Capercaillie, held together a high octane set of jigs and reels from an effortlessly tight band – which was all the more remarkable for the fact that his violin player had to be drafted in just a few hours earlier in an emergency and had learnt his parts in the car on the way to Cambridge whilst listening to the set on his iPod.

Antipodean roots collective The Waifs helped the damp crowd dry off with some feelgood tunes setting the mood for the evening’s proceedings. But while a chatty Billy Bragg drew a packed audience on the main stage which stayed for politically charged folk rockers The Levellers it was on Stage 2 where the audience was really getting moving.

The evening provided a rare chance to witness two groups who really know how to raise the roof. It’s almost unheard of for New Orleans brass bands to tour outside the US but the Hot 8 brass Band have recently become a cult success in Britain thanks to some club remixes on the dance scene and coverage in the UK music press. Hip hop, funk and jazz collided as the group delivered the most refreshingly original sound of the festival so far. But if any audience members had managed to stay still throughout their set they were soon moving their feet, whooping and clapping in time to the amazing Grupo Fantasma, the Texan latin funk collective who were in the UK for the first time.

They left the stage to a deafening chorus of encores and had no choice but to return and deliver a final killer blow of salsa flavoured grooves before the hot and sticky audience filed out still nodding their heads to the rhythms.

On Saturday folk singer Chris Wood got the crowd behind him with a gentle set of traditional English music and got a roar of approval when he invited Karine Polwart onto the stage to sing with him.But it was left to Gaelic collective Altan to help the sun break through the clouds and get the rain soaked crowd to their feet with a set that could have started a party in a morgue.

Malian musician Bessekou Kouyate and his band Ngoni Ba were the act many world music fans had come to see and they didn’t disappoint. The only thing he could say in English appeared to be ‘Are you having fun?’, but since the answer was always a very loud ‘Yes!’ from the audience no-one seemed to mind.

Acoustic bluesman Eric Bibb, backed by Pentangle bass player Danny Thompson, fitted the lazy late afternoon mood perfectly. And while Martha Wainwright looked like she might have been more comfortable on a smaller stage later in the evening (where her occasionally extreme language wouldn’t have reached quite so many young ears), New Orleans funk and soul legend Allen Toussaint connected effortlessly with the crowd as he performed his own versions of songs which he has written for some of the biggest names in music over the past five decades.

The artists that many at Cherry Hinton Hall had travelled to see was Canadian country singer k.d. lang who bowled over the unconverted with the most stunning vocal performance of the weekend.

The set stretched from interpretations of classics like Neil Young’s Helpless to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah which both surpassed the originals, to showstopping performances of her best loved songs Miss Chatelaine and Constant Craving and an old time country string band farewell which proved she can lick any tune she chooses.
Sunday saw festival favourite Seth Lakeman get a hero’s homecoming welcome from the crowd while singer Judy Collins gave the older members of the audience something to reminisce about and the younger members something to go digging in the their parents record collections for. Richard Hawley proved to be the saviour of the final day after stepping in to take up the space left by John Hiatt who was forced to cancel through illness. UK music legend Joan Armatrading helped round off the weekend before the thousands of music lovers filed out the gates, each with their own favourite moment from another great Cambridge Folk Festival.