44TH CAMBRIDGE FOLK FESTIVAL: SCOTTISH SHOWCASE
CHERRY HINTON HALL, CAMBRIDGEMOBILE phones may have largely superseded the Cambridge Folk Festival message tree – a tall sycamore at the entrance where friends would leave each
other notes and hand-drawn route maps through the campsite – but little else has changed over the years at this evergreen veteran of the UK festival circuit, which honed its essential logistics, infrastructure and broad-church programming to nigh-on perfection decades ago.
Even this year's Scottish Showcase promotion, spotlighting eight acts from Scotland in partnership with the Scottish Arts Council, was less of a new departure than the addition of an official banner to what has long been a considerable Scottish contingent within the line-up.
The impact of Saturday's brilliantly barnstorming Cambridge debut by Orcadian eight-piece The Chair was pithily encapsulated by the next act, English alt-trad hero Chris Wood. "Blimey," he observed, "those Orkney people – they don't muck about, do they?"
The Scots were doing the business across much of the diverse sub-genre spectrum that Cambridge embraces under "folk". Along with The Chair, the Peatbog Faeries expertly incited mass outbreaks of euphoric jigging, while our youngest delegates, Siobhan Miller and Jeana Leslie, bewitchingly flew the flag for traditional song.
Brian McNeill settled in to host his customary Saturday afternoon session, and singer-songwriter Karine Polwart was welcomed back like the favourite daughter of this festival that she is, having first wowed the crowds here the year she launched her solo career. She was in wonderfully relaxed and incisive form, offsetting her own compelling balladry with a radiantly gutsy cover of Cole Porter's Don't Fence Me In.
The tartan mafia even got to work on the audience's most impressionable minds, as Tom Bancroft's award-winning Kidsamonium show enjoyed its first folk festival outing.
Given their presence amidst such exalted company as k d lang, Joan Armatrading, Martha Wainwright and Allen Toussaint, hopefully this string of excellent performances won't have gone unnoticed by the numerous music-biz movers and shakers in attendance.
The full article contains 346 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
