review of Port Fairy Folk Festival (verylong)
Peter Rayner
it.
It's always fun writing a review, it's a golden opportunity to be my usual
opinionated self for a few lines in comparative safety. In this case the
object is the annual Port Fairy folk festival, held on the Labour Day
week-end. In Victoria this makes it early March, the 8-11th in this
case.
Two pieces of geography and history are useful for setting the scene, my
apologies to local readers who know this stuff. Port Fairy is an old
fishing port on the western coast of Victoria. It is exposed quite
directly to the Southern Ocean and the next land further south would almost
be the Antarctic coast. It is important to remind yourself of this when
you're standing on the wharf, with shanties barely audible through the
gale and hypothermia threatening those at the margins. Secondly this is an
unofficial county of Ireland. The place used to be named Belfast and
Kilarney is just up Route 1.
The festival is probably Australia's largest purely folk festival, at least
as regards audience. It usually draws 15,000 paying customers let alone
the many more who don't buy tickets and spend the week-end in the pubs and
free venues. This dwarfs the local population. The sensible ones go into
hiding unless they can make some money out of the thing.
There are six major stages with music playing continuously from 10:00am to
midnight. There are also lots of smaller venues and street players of
course. For a true die-hard this is not a relaxing week-end. I can, of
course, only review what I saw. This precludes the welcome concert on the
Friday night. This has moved from the old midnight time-slot I used to
love.
I won't report everything I saw, about 27 hours of music, just some of the
highlights and surprises/disappointments. The two headline acts were Tom
Paxton on an all-too-rare tour hereabouts and the hot act of Melbourne last
year, "Weddings, Parties Anything". Well that's not quite fair, Judy Small
and Redgum should probably get a mention too. These first.
I saw Paxton in one of the major concerts on the Saturday night. The
current performance style of the festival is to have many shorter
performances in a concert ratherr than dedicating it to a single act so I
only saw him for an hour. Overall the performance is best summed up with a
remark he made near the opening "ya dance with who brung ya", that is he
played a lot of the songs from the 60s which made him famous. The aging
60s refugees in the audience were delighted and there are now a surprising
number of people who haven't heard this material much and they also seemed
impressed. So was I, mostly with the good grace with which Paxton endured
it, it can't be much fun playing this now. Songs included things
like (sorry I don't own these on record so can only quote subtitles)
"bottle o' wine" "leaving London" and as his last song "last thing on my
mind". I like Paxton more as a comic rather than serious writer so was
glad to hear "thank you republic airlines ..." and "yuppies in the sky" in
particular. At another gig he apparently also did "they can go and drop
the big one but the mail will go through" which has one of the best
choruses in contemporary music. As usual if you go and see Tom Paxton you're
assured of a good concert even though there were few new delights here.
Not only are "Weddings Parties Anything" a hard band to describe, I'm a bad
person to do it. The tent was packed for their Sunday afternoon
performance, probably the biggest single gig of the festival.
A fairly electric band + an
accordion sound they seemed to play mostly their ownmusic with some trad'
dance music. By this stage of a week-end like this I get harsher in my
tastes but we left after I couldn't tell the difference abetween the first
three songs. Most of the rest of the crowd seemed to be getting what they
came for though.
Judy Small. She could almost go down as an old stager here, it was at the
84 Fairy that myself and lots of other Victorians were left reeling after a
three hour workshop on women's songs about war from the 20th century. One
woman, a guitar and a hall that kept getting fuller. No treasures like
that this time, the format doesn't allow for them. I saw her twice, on the
Saturday afternoon and the Sunday evening. On the Saturday she had her
band from "snapshot" with her and did a lot of material from it. I
couldn't escape the remark "yes great lyrics Jude but how about a new
tune". My favourite was "wife of a cocky farmer" which she didn't write.
As a piece of trivia, this magnificent song arose as a competition winner
at this festival. To be fair, the lyrics *were* great as usual. On the
Sunday night she came on alone and revisited a lot of material from
"mothers, daughters, wives" to "Golden Arches". The songs are good enough
for frequent revisits and "women of our time" which *is* a different tune
sounded better than I've ever heard it. As an example of how tight the
format is, she wasn't allowed an encore which almost caused a riot. As a
final note, on the Friday before the festival, the citizens of Canberra
could enjoy a song-writing workshop jointly run by Eric Bogle and Judy
Small. Lucky bastards.
Redgum. There are a generation of us who were delighted to learn, in the
70s, that Australians didn't have to sound like Americans when they sang.
I discovered this through two records. One was "Freedom on the Wallaby"
from Dave de Hugard. The other was "If you don't fight you lose" from
Redgum. I'm horrified to think this album is nearly fifteen years old. So
are the band no doubt. Well some records, some line-ups and a few musical
excursions later they're still at it. Their Sunday morning gig was only
slightly smaller than the abovementioned WPA show. This one was a real
nostalgia fest. Things like "Poor Ned" off IYDFYL and "Nuclear Cop" off
"Virgin Ground". I was hoping to hear more of the female singer and the
jazz style she seemed to be leading them into.
Now some lesser names. It's customary to see at least one record launched
at the Fairy. This year it was Dennis and Lyn Tracy's new album "Red Fox".
The record launch was brilliant. They had the band from the album, the
same as for Judy Small's latest, which, almost inevitably, included John
Munroe. He is apparently back playing with Bogle now so "Tracy
Munroe Tracy" doesn't exist in name. Most of the material is original, I
think Lyn wrote most of it. She has a beautiful voice for the light
pensive material she writes, it wouldn't do for murder ballads but that's
ok. Dennis's husky, heartfelt singing is a nice contrast. All in all a
good record and a better concert.
Danny Spooner. Another bad one to review, I'm sort of a friend. He really
*is* one of the old stagers here, as he is around the Melbourne folk scene
in general. The shanty singing on the wharf on Saturday evening is
something I don't miss, nor the hymn singing in the old Anglican church on
Sunday, one accordion and a bunch of good harmonists. Danny Spooner,
Gordon Mc'intyre and Kate Delaney opened our week-end with a short set on
the Saturday morning and Spooner and Shirley Power ran a (too short)
session on traditional ballads on the Sunday.
Zingara. My pleasant surprise for the week-end. A multi-instrumented
5-piece band they play a good range of acoustic traditional material from
the English medieval to Klesmer. The philosophy of selection is the only
one I aprove of, "if we like it we do it". They also played for some
so-called multicultural dances. Any group which will play "merrily kissed
the Quaker's wife" in 5/4 as an encore deserves credit.
Greg Champion. A somewhat famous name off Australian radio with his modern
sporting ballads!? Possibly only in Australia could someone make a living
singing mainly about football and cricket although his introduction of "I
know what you're saying. 'Yep he's pretty good but does he know any songs
about carpet?'" shows he's broadening his repertoire in artistically
significant directions (8-). Actually his show on the Saturday night,
before Paxton, wasn't quite as good as I'd have hoped but not bad all the
same.
Martin Nolan. An Irish piper. Actually he wasn't the star of this show
quite but I can't remember the name of the didgeridoo player. It's a great
rythm instrument. Apparently they'd only started playing together the week
before but they should keep doing it.
Claymore. Mainly Scottish material. This duo is noteworthy for its
extremely heavy use of synth'. They do it really well,it's by far their
main instrument. This is always educational for us hide-bound trad's.
Finn Castle Mill. Another good generalist group playing mainly
Anglo-Celtic and contemporary material across a range of instruments. Good
harmonists too. Another group releasing a tape for the festival. We were
pleased enough to buy it.
Salvation Jane. Five women singing a capela. Timeless classics like
"operator, information, get me jesus on the line". Good tight harmony for
all that.
Things I missed. Roy Bailey, just didn't find the time. Piping hot. An
electric dance band + a highland pipe, I walked past them once and they
sounded pretty exciting. Jimmy Young. A Northumbrian piper, why all the
pipes this year? Many, many others.