Entries from January 2009 ↓

The second day of Woodford dawned bright, hot and early (unsurprisingly). Now that I knew I didn't want to go to the Poets Breakfast it was easy to be at a loose end after being driven from the tent - I certainly didn't want to start buying things so early in the festival, because otherwise I was sure to gain momentum and end up with digeridoos and electric bicycles and goodness knows that else by the end of the week. Eating mushrooms on toast (while sitting on a hay bale, hee hee) and poking at the day's programme chewed up some time, and I discovered an inflatable teapot floating on a pond.

Unfortunately, there was nothing I especially wanted to see until 2pm, my "maybes" didn't even start until eleven, and it was only just after nine. I eventually floated over to the Folklorica tent to see what was going on, and surprised myself by very much enjoying some Indian classical music. I usually find that style of music irritating to listen to, at least if I'm listening to a recording,¹ but some low-key sitar and tabla was just the thing for the beginning of a hot, busy day. It's possible that this was my one and only moment of Indian-classical-music-appreciation, but who knows - it could even happen again.

For the lack of anything better to do, I went to the Bazaar tent (my festival favourite!) to sit and watch the band before the band I was vaguely interested in seeing. It turned out to be Jimi Hocking, who was hugely entertaining (and also played some pretty good music).

As well as being a self-described "skinny white guy playing the blues" (very well, I might add), he regaled the audience with tales of Memphis and Melbourne and was funnier than most of the "comedians" I saw at Woodford. As well as pointing out that he is actually a nice guy despite being an ex-Screaming Jet, he defended himself pre-emptively against allegations of water-drinking:

I don't want you to think I'm some kind of vegetarian, water-drinking, yoga-doing blues guy, because I'm the exact opposite. This is actually some kind of clear alcohol ... what would that be? Vodka? This is vodka.

Some of his folkier songs fell a bit flat for me, but this was still a lucky find.

After Jimi Hocking came James Grehan, one of the "maybes" that I'd noted in the interests of finding out what more artists sound like. A stark contrast from the garrulous and exuberant Jimi Hocking, Grehan was - and I don't mean this in a perjorative sense - a total wimp.² He seemed to be the mousy, self-effacing sort of performer (which I usually find a bit strange), but played a nice enough sort of blues-ish folk-ish rock-ish music. Oddly, the best description that has occurred to me is that he and his band were like a subdued, personal rather than political, John Butler Trio. Doubtless this is because of the bizarre and enormous gaps in my musical knowledge. Oh well.

Next up was Katie Noonan, who turned out to be one of the greatest disappointments of the festival. Fond memories of seeing her being awesome in George several years ago led me to get to the Concert tent early and secure a seat (and I still almost missed out), but although she still has the voice of an angel (or perhaps a mermaid) I did not enjoy her performance at all. In fact, I left after three or four songs. The entire setlist appeared to consist of pretentious jazzy Beatles covers. Now, I am not against pretentiousness, jazz, the Beatles, or cover versions, taken singly and/or done well. I also don't think that covers need to be faithful recreations of the original - in fact, the vast majority of the best covers are not. However, I do think that it should be possible to discern the roots of the song in the cover. Therefore: if you are going to cover iconic songs in a completely unrecognisable way, introducing them beforehand is just going to disappoint an audience³ who expects to be able to recognise something. Maybe if Noonan had back-announced the songs instead it would have been slightly less irritating, but the unfortunate truth was that the cover versions were not musically interesting in their own right either. You won't catch me at a Katie Noonan show any time soon.

After that disappointment it was lovely to be able to catch David Hyams and the Miles To Go Band again. Their soundcheck was, as usual, a protracted process; it could be said that they are slow and picky, but I think that's entirely justified given the number of musicians on stage and the lovely sounds they produce when everything is set up nicely. On this particular day I realised that they tap into my childhood love for the tape we had at home with The Cobbers on one side and The Corries on the other.⁴

On the way to my next stop I passed a couple of interesting-sounding things without really stopping to take proper notice: something involving xylophones and drums and jumping about, and Dubmarine at the Murri tent. One of my favourite things about Woodford was the way I could just wander along somewhere and see what was happening, and much of the time it would be something interesting.⁵

The next stop was Jigzag, who turned out to be three string players (female) and one guitar player (male) who played music that I would expect to hear at a bush dance in a scout hall somewhere. Despite what you might think, they were not horrible. Not my kind of thing, really, but not horrible. However, the guitarist looked as though he should really be holding an electric guitar in a classic rock cover band somewhere:

Or maybe that's just me. As is often the case with music in genres I am not especially fond of, I preferred the purely instrumental songs; although Jigzag had some nice vocal things going on, objectively speaking, I wasn't terribly interested. Oh, and apparently their merchandise includes aprons and "frilly knickers". Perhaps I am just not part of their target audience.

After Jigzag there is something of a blank, in my memory as well as my notebook. I assume that I wandered about and at some stage ate something. I also noted my glee at the designations of five portable toilet blocks near the Grande tent: two as "male", two as "female", and one as "ladies". Then, gritting my teeth and girding my loins (as it were), I went to brave Lior with Attached Strings at the Grande.

Let it be recorded that I only did so because I really wanted to see the next band, and the Grande at night tended to be jam-packed (to such an extent that people would be several deep outside the boundary of the tent, and then spread up the adjoining hillside). Oh my goodness, I have no idea why Lior was at a folk festival, even a folk festival that does not fear non-folk genres. I have no idea why people love this kind of thing, although I am painfully aware that they do. I suppose I can understand why people like Lior: a good-looking boy with a nice-sounding voice, a few latin rhythms and some melodic flourishes will go a long way, especially if you are a thirteen-year-old girl or a grandmother. But there can be no logical explanation for the outpouring of adulation that I witnessed at the Grande. None.

I find it especially hilarious, given my earlier complaints, that Lior brought Katie Noonan onstage to do a duet. Oh dear me. At least it was over eventually, and they both went away.

If it hadn't been for Frightened Rabbit, I might have had a much harder time deciding whether or not to go to Woodford. Not that it would have been a bad idea, mind you, but the prospect of seeing the band responsible for one of my favourite albums of 2008 made the decision very, very easy. Incidentally, this guitarist looks awfully like someone else:

Sadly, the recurring problem of muddy sound and bass-buried melodies at the Grande did Frightened Rabbit no favours, yet I can't blame the lacklustre performance entirely on the sound engineer. Playing loud all the time is certainly an option available to rock bands, but I think you need more chutzpah and stronger material than Frightened Rabbit possess to really pull it off - and most bands that seem to play loud all the time do actually have some understanding of the concept of contrast. Maybe I just feel ripped off because the delicate balancing act between crunch and whisper that so endeared The Midnight Organ Fight to me is not at all in evidence when Frightened Rabbit play live, and because a lack of either confidence or ability outside the studio makes Scott Hutchison's vocals a pathetic shadow of the recorded version.⁶ Maybe I'm being overly harsh, and maybe jetlag and heat and other unknown things were factors that should be taken into consideration, but at the moment I'm waiting to see if their next album proves The Midnight Organ Fight to be some kind of fluke. Phooey!

I still enjoyed some of the songs, but my desire for them to be as good as they are on the album was too strong to leave me anything but disappointed. And then I called it a night.

1. Unless The Beatles are appropriating it. I know, I know. [↩]
2. I'm going to be really embarrassed if he ever reads this, now, aren't I. [↩]
3. The audience I refer to is, of course, me. Most of the crowd ate it up. Bah humbug. [↩]
4. In fact, this probably goes for pretty much all the folk-influenced Anglo-Celtic music that I ever hear. [↩]
5. Or at least something listenable. [↩]
6. My reflexive dislike of the thing that singers do where they change the melody they sing may play some part here, but to be fair I can learn to like it as long as they don't suck all melodic beauty out of the song in doing so. This was more a matter of "oh, I think my range is only a fifth of an octave, I'd better not sing the songs the way I wrote them." [↩]

The first day of Woodford proper began, as is only proper, by being scorched out of the tent early in the morning. My goodness, it was hot. But this time I did take a picture of Tent City:

That picture was taken at 7:30 in the morning, which means it had been too hot to be alive in the tent even earlier than that. See the shade that's covering some of the tents? Yeah, we didn't have that. It was HOT.

Just inside the festival gate there was a wall painted beautifully with mazes and logic puzzles and things. I took some pictures, meaning to come back and have a proper look later, but somehow I never did.

There was a Poets' Breakfast, where the only vegetarian breakfast food had non-optional eggs (which drjon heroically saved me from having to eat) and the poets were fairly tedious. There was one fellow who did what was basically a stand-up comedy routine, which I enjoyed lots, but as for the rest ... well, I'm glad I discovered on the first day that I didn't need to bother going to the Poets' Breakfasts for the rest of the festival.

Next, I trotted off to the Folklorica stage for the dubiousy-named "Invocation Rituals" set. It was actually really good, despite my misgivings: Tenzin Choegyal chanted and sang and played a flute, as well as attempting some fairly ambitious audience participation, which was lovely, and then Sam Okoth (accompanied by a percussionist whose name I've forgotten who was from England, "just a little north of Africa") came on in his fetching getup:

and put on an excellent performance. I really enjoyed his music, although I wasn't sure if they were all traditional Kenyan songs, just generically "African",¹ or original compositions. He also made some interesting observations, both insightful ("going home" to get some of what you need doesn't have to be about a physical place) and funny (in Kenya, rich people dance slowly because they have no need to move fast - so the sluggish Woodford audience must be made up of very rich people).

There was a third item in the Invocation Rituals set, but I left early to catch Miguel performing at a different stage.

A very competent eight-piece jazz band, Miguel were ill-served by the early hour and the venue. I think they would be much better suited to a back-alley club after dark than an overgrown circus tent in the glare of the morning. The sound engineering at the Grande stage was disappointing,² and the band played everything very, very straight, but a few people still got up and danced. I preferred their latin-style songs to the cooler, laid-back jazz, but that may just have been because I was mentally gearing up for a week of festival and wanted something high-energy to feed on. Fortunately, some of that was coming up next.

Waiting For Guinness were fun like a barrel of monkeys. Another one of those bands that people attempt to describe by sticking together different genres, their website suggests "garage cabaret", "gypsy punk", and "gangster jazz" as possibilities. Less feral than the Barons of Tang and orders of magnitude more entertaining than Miguel, Waiting for Guinness made a lot of noise and got people dancing in the gravel and dust, including little kids and people without shoes on (ouch). They also attracted the festivalgoer whom I dubbed Dancing Guy, because I saw him again and again and he was always dancing.

Next up was one of my festival favourites - perhaps even my absolute favourite - in David Hyams and the Miles To Go Band, at the endearingly-named Duck and Shovel venue. Seven band members on stage (one of whom was playing with the band for the very first time), including a cellist, a fiddler and a guy with a whistle (yay!) played a lovely acoustic, celtic-influenced yet very Australian sort of folk music. No pictures, because the ones I took are too dark and grainy even by my low Woodford standards. After seeing this band, though, I immediately re-examined my festival schedule to see how many more times I could see them. (One and a half - hooray!)

After David Hyams, Twisted Oak took to the stage, but I fled the venue after hearing their soundcheck. Not that they weren't musically accomplished, but a bunch of antipodean teenagers playing traditional bluegrass, one of them with a banjo, was really not something I wanted to listen to. While I found much to appreciate in unfamiliar musical genres at Woodford, much of the charm lay in the perceived authenticity of the performers, and Twisted Oak had none of that for me. I wandered over to the Chai tent, where Mr Percival was playing, but despite a certain similarity to Mal Webb (whose performances I already enjoy) and what seemed to be an engaging performance, I was completely exhausted³ and trudged off to become unconscious in the tent.

Said unconsciousness lasted much longer than I had planned. I didn't have to decide whether the Opening Ceremony would be too cheesy to go to, because I was asleep. I also missed Evenish, Mic Conway's National Junk Band, and That 1 Guy. I did eventually wake up and make my way back to the festival, sat through technical difficulties and some indifferent short films (QPIX's Best of the Best, apparently), then went and crashed for the night. Spoiler warning: Fortunately, this was pretty much the only time I was too tired to see and enjoy things all week.

1. I am significantly uncomfortable with the lumping of just about all African culture into one basket by and for stupid whiteys; I suppose a similar thing happens with most other cultures that didn't start out European, as well. Blech. [↩]
2. A trend that would continue throughout the festival and really spoil the experience of seeing some of the bands. [↩]
3. Leftovers from Christmas Day, I think. Being at the festival was generally energising rather than exhausting. [↩]

Although the Woodford Folk Festival officially began the day after, we went up on Boxing Day. This clever strategy would enable us to enjoy not only the festivities starting bright and early on Saturday morning, but also some of the performances on the Friday evening which were not listed in the festival programme.¹.

Woodford is about 80km NNW of Brisbane. The plan was to catch a train to Caboolture, then a bus straight to the festival. Nice and simple. Of course, the completely unannounced trackworks at Petrie (which is between Brisbane and Caboolture) occasioned a trip to the station office to find out what was going on, followed by an impressive (if I do say so myself) sprint up and down stairs to get back on the right platform before the train left, and then a transfer to an extra bus (which was, naturally, filled with cranky people who didn't want to have to catch an extra bus). I amused myself by playing "Guess which people on the bus are going to Woodford" and looking at things out of the window, which included:

• A sign saying "HORSE POO $3".
• A place named Burpengary. (Australian place names are so awesome.)
• A town that looked like the area full of shopping malls that I went to in Buffalo, NY to get my PowerBook's power cable replaced.

Eventually, we got to Woodford. Much queueing ensued, followed by an introduction to our home away from home for the next week, in Tent City. There's a lot to be said for paying to stay in a tent that someone else puts up and takes down, with access to facilities including free drinking water² and the aforementioned showers in trucks. Especially when one does not actually own a tent. I didn't take a picture of the tent, which was remiss of me, but I did hang some elephants outside it.

My first impression of the festival site itself was of stalls. Lots and lots of stalls. Most of them sold clothes and accessories (especially hats), although there were also several stalls selling amazing musical instruments and, of course, an abundance of food vendors. Thanks to the expected density of the hippie population there was an abundance of vegetarian options, albeit with surprisingly slim pickings for vegans.

But I wasn't there to spend money and get more stuff. I was there to see bands! And to take pictures of them, although that was for my own record and enjoyment rather than artistic or technical merit (as will quickly become apparent) and I certainly didn't bother about getting up to the front of the stage to do it.

The first band of the festival for me was The Barons of Tang, who describe themselves as sounding like "gypsy deathcore & dirt fever in a dirty bar on the wrong side of town drinking Shlivovitz at 2am discussing the difference between grindcore and techcore." I would probably describe them as Martin Martini and the Bone Palace Orchestra, if Martin Martini led a bunch of young punks who would rather howl and grimace than pretend to any kind of sophistication, however twisted. Two drummers/percussionists, tuba and double bass, accordion, reeds and the occasional fiddle played by the guitarist all contributed to an exuberant cacophony that got the crowd dancing (and even my staid foot tapping). A rollicking good time was had by all!

Matt Kelly and the Keepers were supposed to be next, but apparently Matt Kelly had spontaneously combusted or something as they were a no-show. Not too heartbreaking, as I was only planning to see them in the absence of anything more enticing. Much more disappointing was the actual appearance of Hawksley Workman some time later.

This guy made a bad impression on me as soon as he walked on stage, with his ironically hip flat cap, untied tie, waistcoat and smugness. Actually, that's not quite true: he made a bad impression on me when his bio somewhere called him "one of the hardest-working musicians" in something something, and his festival bio said that "averaging two albums a year, he traverses genres fearlessly". Reading that, I suspected that he had delusions of awesomeness while actually being very generic and derivative, and I fled his stage after a couple of songs that sounded like he thought he was Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen and three other similarly iconic artists all rolled into one and some horribly pretentious waffle³. I honestly just could not sit through any more of it.

There was a silver lining, though: I ended up at a different stage where a group called Melodics were playing. I hadn't planned to see them at the festival, as nothing I read about them interested me much, but they put on a good show. Australian hip-hop with synths and saxophone and enough originality and verve to distance them completely from the sort of hip-hop made by urban white kids in Australia who want to be gangstas. I was especially impressed by the saxophone solos and the vocals, with a special mention of the clever fellow who played sax and synths simultaneously.

The final act of the night was Newfoundland's Hey Rosetta!, who I thought were very endearing as well as being really rather good. They were all young and indie-beardy apart from the frontman who was young and unbeardy (their female violinist was absent, having missed a flight), so that I initially thought he was a roadie because he didn't match. Hee hee.. They also had a rather tall guitarist.

Combining fairly standard pop-rock instrumentation (guitars, bass, drums, vocals, occasional keys) with strings (cello, and the missing violin), Hey Rosetta! deliver a punchy, dense sound that is vaguely reminiscent of early Travis⁴ , Coldplay and Muse (I would have been really, really into this band in the late nineties) while still being original and complex enough for me to make an exception to my rule about bands with exclamation marks in their names. Their live performance was superb, and I will not be surprised if I hear a lot more about them in the future.

On Day Zero I also had one of my favourite Woodford moments: looking across the pond at the big circus tent, all lit up for night-time, and listening to the frogs.

1. Thanks to my protracted attempt to navigate the (awful) section of the website where one could attempt to create a schedule, I had discovered secret performances of some bands I wanted to see. Then I used iCal to actually create a schedule in a non-insane manner. Take that, terrible website! [↩]
2. The only way to get drinking water on the festival site was to pay for it. [↩]
3. Quoted verbatim from my notebook: oh god seriously a story about going to the desert and going off all chemicals and something about a coyote oh god oh god [↩]
4. This may only be because vocalist Tim Baker sounds strangely like Fran Healy [↩]

I'm back from an amazing seven days at Woodford, through which I breathed and sweated and had a wonderful time, and somehow it's 2009. Well, well.

I spent less time taking pictures than I expected to, and still ended up with just under five hundred to sort through upon my (triumphant) return. I discovered lots of amazing new bands (and several that were not so amazing), as well as rediscovering my folkier inclinations. I bought a tin whistle and turned up to a "Lean to play tin whistle" workshop, only to discover that I could have given a better "Learn to play tin whistle" workshop and I was better off learning tunes and twiddles myself; I also went to two workshops where various feel-good strategies and hippie nonsense¹ got people out of their shells and singing, in the process partially overcoming whatever ridiculous block was causing me to bleat timidly rather than sing in the presence of others.

I didn't go to any "Radiance Workshops" or indulge in any of the other hippie nonsense² on offer, or attend much in the way of spoken word and film events. Instead, I spent almost the entire time marching around in the dust from one sweltering tent to the next, then squiggling illegible things in my little notebook about whatever exciting discovery was on stage this time. There was festival food, and getting scorched out of the tent by eight in the morning, and two thunderstorms, and wearing an awesome hat, and drinking five litres of water a day. It was great.

Miscellaneous highlights included:

• Showers and toilets in a truck!
• Having my reliance on intuition vindicated yet again, chiefly by the Barons of Tang, David Hyams and the Miles To Go Band, and Rosie Burgess.
• A surprising abundance of cellos, saxophones, and Scottish accents.
• The Great Band Competition, in which complete strangers were flung together to form bands in under 24 hours.
• The ilovemushrooms stall.
• New hippie pants (which fit! and are long enough! Miracle of miracles!) and a T-shirt that looks like a band T-shirt but secretly has an environmental slogan on it.
• The overheard exclamation of a shocked hipster girl: "No-one wears makeup here!"
• Enjoying and appreciating genres of music that I wouldn't usually come across, let alone sit and listen to for forty minutes.
• Wah pedals combined with acoustic guitars and electric violins.
• The best vibe of any festival - or, come to that, any place with lots of people - I've been to.

Lowlights were few and far between, but included:

• Pompous know-it-alls (especially the ones who were actually completely wrong).
• People who clap along OUT OF TIME.
• Terrible, terrible sound engineering at one of the biggest stages.
• Pretentious people who dance half-heartedly while looking sidelong at everyone else who's dancing, because it's all about looking cool and not about actually wanting to dance.³
• A lack of awesome breakfast food.
• Sitting in plastic chairs for a week.
• Band fatigue,⁴ which started to set in on the last day.

Coming back to the real world has been strange, although the time out from my daily routine has helped to solidify my resolve, in a way. No New Year's Resolutions for me this year; instead, a focus on pursuing and cultivating the things I value, and on leaving the path of least resistance. It always happens that a change of environment and time spent doing things on my own bring my ideals closer, where I can actually see them. The challenge, I suppose, is in keeping hold of that along with the regular everyday demands of regular everyday existence.

Some Tales of Woodford, complete with photos, will appear over the next little while, but I intend to take my time about it.

1. The good kind. [↩]
2. The bad kind. [↩]
3. Give me dancing hippies over dancing hipsters any day. [↩]
4. Oh look, it's yet another band that uses the word "gypsy" in describing itself. Oh look, it's yet another band who grew up listening to You Am I. [↩]