Mrs Sciencebase and myself once again headed for Cherry Hinton Hall for this year’s Cambridge Folk Festival (27-30 July 2023). This time around, I didn’t take any camera equipment other than my phone. Still ended up taking almost 300 photos and videos nevertheless…I’ve put the photos in a video montage with a piece of incidental music I wrote and recorded once we got home, inspired by the festival and a guitar workshop with Nigel Wearne (pictured below). The tune Festival Friends, is also now available to stream or download from my BandCamp page as part of my Four Missing Keys EP.
We enjoyed the following acts Gnoss, Flyte, Symbio, Ibibio Sound Machine, Nigel Wearne (on stage and for me a guitar workshop), Lady Blackbird (massively who finished hiser set with a tribute to Tina Turner in the form of River Deep, Mountain High and Proud Mary), Folk Camps Party Band with caller Fee Lock, The Longest Johns (quite a tame Wellerman rendition it has to be said, Stornoway (in favour of the second half of The Proclaimers’ set, they do a version of The Only Way is Up on which the intro to our band C5’s arrangement is loosely based), Kate Rusby (very funny), (un peu de) Le Vent du Nord, Niteworks (incredible Celtic EDM with pipes, a little bit of Rufus Wainright, some Arrested Development, Judy Collins, the fantastic Ferris + Sylvester, a spot of Breabach, William Prince, Oi Va Voi, Elephant Sessions, Angélique Kidjo (who did some great Talking Heads covers), Imelda May who did a stunning tribute to her late friend Sinead O’Connor in Nothing Compares 2U.
There were others that we ducked in and out of on various stages…Baskery, Son of Town Hall etc…you can’t get to see everyone and it always feels like you’ve missed out when you hear back from friends who were audience at one stage when you were at another, but all in a lovely weekend again.
One of the highlights for us was that we joined the Festival Choir with Ben and Dom and got to perform a 30-minute set Sunday, on Stage 3 (actually the choir was too big for the stage, so we were in front of it), but we went down well with a captive audience keeping out of the Sunday rain!
