MUSIC

The current political landscape means there’s never been a better time to revive the Bristol Folk Festival, argues Julian Owen.

A city like Bristol should have a Folk Festival. Folk music, after all, is the arts world’s most vivid, immediate and often most eloquent telling of a people’s history. And, people, we have a lot of history. A maritime power for tens of generations, home to a seafaring citizenry from whose lives folksong flings away the centuries and presents them before us, fear and hope, love and heartbreak, grief and joy, preserved as surely as their bones. “We told him we was from Bristol Town/And on our course was bound/And ask-ed of him the reason why/He ran us so fast down,” reels ‘The Bold Pirate’, transcribed in 1924 by a folkologist in Maine, as three 80-something women sang songs their father taught them. A few skirmishes later, revenge, and the capture of his loot-laden ship. By the way, if you happen to be reading this down the docks, why not stand up and sing? No one will mind: “We took her all in tow, my boys/What a glorious sight to see/We towed her in to the sight of land/Beside the Bristol quay/Where each one had his fortune made/And we all got safe on shore/We'll ask one another to dine together/And not plough thru sea any more.”

Social history, yes, but also timeless desires. “People want something that’s real,” says Seth Lakeman, patron of the Colston Hall-staged Bristol Folk Festival, opening night headliner, and – ’til recently – Bristol resident. “Journalists were saying after the Brit Awards about how the way folk music has worked in the last 12-18 months is a telling sign of that. People want conversation with music, something to believe in. It’s all to do with where society is.” For folk music, it always has been. Despite what some traditionalists would have you believe, folksong isn’t about preservation, but its polar opposite, change. Specifically, by-the-people change. When the House of Lords rejected the second Reform Bill in 1831, thereby blocking a key step-change in wider representation in the House of Commons, a voiceless and enraged people rioted in Queen Sq and throughout the country. The bill passed a year later. Name any subsequent movement – Chartists, Suffragettes, the wider drive for emancipation, and on – and you’ll find folksong record of history, either written after the event or – more likely – powering it with voices singing in unison on the barricades.

1979 saw the last staging of a Bristol Folk Festival when, alas, the Avon burst its banks at the Hanham Mills site and left organiser Reg Mann with a £10,000 loss. Happily Reg, now 79 and a thriving greengrocer in Midsomer Norton, will be a VIP guest at the revived event. 1979, of course, also saw the election of a government unequivocal and unashamed in its determination to strip the powers of the workers’ unions that had grown from those earlier mass movements, and successfully fostered a belief that we’re best off simply looking out for ourselves; a doctrine largely sustained by governments of all persuasions since, to the point where the word ‘solidarity’ itself fell from view. Until now...

Some cornerstones remain. Voting rights, equality in law of race, gender and sexuality, regulation of working hours and so forth mean we’re still standing – or, perhaps, slouching – on the shoulders of those who came before. Nevertheless, we live in a state bedevilled by a national debt of which the vast majority was racked up bailing out a reckless banking sector; and under a government whose instinct is not to pay it down by charging those responsible, but by hacking away at the very emblems of a ‘for the people’ society: libraries, forests, a National Health Service.

Steve Knightley is one half of Saturday night headliners Show of Hands, arguably the biggest folk act in the land. On 26 March his band played the anti-cuts March For The Alternative gathering in Hyde Park. It is, he says, a time for folk music. “A lot of singer-songwriters do emotional landscape, what they’ve done and what they feel, but in folk song it’s very often the little guy, the working man or woman, caught up in large events, whether it’s Napoleonic wars, deforestation, leaving the land to industrialisation.” Thus, the freshly penned song he played that afternoon, and its sardonic opening couplet: “We’re all in it together, one family under the sky/But I’m on the shore and the wave’s coming in, and you’re on the hills warm and dry”. “We’re in that tradition of singing the news,” he says, “whereby people struggle to do nothing more heroic than make a living and raise families day to day, while great forces are at work around them. You’re not trying to sum up, you’re just trying to say ‘This is where it washed me.’”

Show of Hands and the city he calls a “musical powerhouse” go back decades. “When I first crawled onto the acoustic scene there were some great venues up in Clifton. Phil, what was the name of the fantastic folk club in Bristol?” he asks of playing partner, Mr Beer. “Full of students, 70s/80s? No..? No, his memory’s gone.” He remembers the Albert Inn (aka Hole), “one of our first ever duo gigs, probably in ’92.” The first – of countless – times they played the Albert Hall, they began the week gigging the inn, thereby awarding themselves the press-intriguing strapline ‘From the Hole to the Hall’.” There’s another reason,” says Steve, why playing the Festival is “a big deal for me in a personal sense. When my son got leukaemia about three years ago, on the opening night of our big tour, he was in Bristol Children’s Hospital. The only show I could get to was walking 200 yards from the children’s unit down to Colston Hall. A very emotional moment, so to come back again and do the show in our own right is great.”

The final night headliner is Bellowhead, recently voted Best Live Act at the BBC Folk Awards for the fifth time. Confirmation that festival organisers, promoter Jan Ayers and BCFM/Jelli Records’ Steve Parkhouse, have put together what the former proudly calls “a big, successful, gorgeous thing. When you’ve got those names, the rest has been easy with other acts falling in behind.” A lot of acts. Check the Roots diary for full detailing of a huge line-up also including aptly named Irish aces Dervish, million pound contract-earning/ad man’s faves Fisherman’s Friends, 3 Daft Monkeys and Ruarri Joseph. Bellowhead duo, Spiers & Boden, will be helming a Mayday ceilidh with a mid-set appearances from Jim Moray-starring local aces Nonesuch Morris, the top of a list of familiar-to-these-parts names including Sheelanagig, Jane Taylor, Phil King, Siddy Bennett and Gaz Brookfield.

“I’m totally excited,” says Gaz. “Look at the line-up, man!” For the hard-gigging singer-songwriter (“Last year I did 130, this year I’m going to smash that”), it’s another high point on a career path that really began to take off when he won an Acoustic Magazine competition, with an appearance at Beautiful Days festival the first of many. “I’ve been thrust into the world of folk without intending to. One minute I’m playing pubs, next I’m rubbing shoulders with folk royalty.”

The local theme is writ large in the venue, with Hall 2 named in honour of late, great local folksperson Fred Wedlock for the duration of the weekend. A silent disco and Songs from the Shed will be inside, too. “A dream find,” says Jan, of the Bob Harris-endorsed former army billet based in the Somerset countryside that has seen recordings from the great and good across multiple genres. “I saw John and his shed on local news and immediately invited him to bring the shed and broadcast all weekend live, so that everybody – big or small – gets a chance.” Throw in hundreds of morris dancers – including three sides dancing at dawn on Brandon Hill, and a big 8am breakfast around the Maypole outside the hall – and you’ve got traditional old school trimmings atop a decidedly modern affair. “Jan and Steve have picked some very exciting contemporary folk artists,” says patron Seth, “that I think will pull in quite a lot of young people. It’s not a very traditional festival – that could work very well in Bristol.” As the old song would have it, what a glorious sight to see.

BRISTOL FOLK FESTIVAL TOOK PLACE IN AND AROUND THE COLSTON HALL FROM FRI 29 APR-SUN 1 MAY. FFI: WWW.BRISTOLFOLKFESTIVAL.COM SEE REVIEW BY CLICKING BACK TO MAIN MUSIC PAGE.

Copyright Julian Owen 2011; Seth Lakeman pic copyright Deidre O'Callaghan 2011