Cambridge Folk Festival: Patti Smith + more
Despite featuring a much higher percentage of hearing aids and bald pates than any festival I’ve ever been to, the Cambridge Folk Festival was one of the warmest (temperature and ambience) places I’ve ever had the pleasure of taking my dancing shoes. Half of the CFF’s charm is the intimacy of its compact arena. Featuring two main stages, one Club Tent, one music ‘Den’, several packed markets, numerous pop-up jammin’ workshops and sprouting improv quartets across the whole camping area, it was thick with the sense of community. Half of its familiarity is down to the fact that many festival-goers have been frequenting this musical bubble since it first opened in 1965. There might be significantly more head-bobbing than mosh pits, but these are people who understand and love folk more than any others. They are here with their hareem pants and adhesive jewels and they are here to stay. These are folk folk. When you hear ‘family festival’, you probably picture parents carting infants around in hippie-trucks, brazenly steering their offspring through clouds of marijuana smoke, and whilst there was definitely some of this, the CFF took ‘family festival’ and turned it into ‘family tree festival’, often starring three generations, at times even perhaps four, of the same family all just as pumped as each other.
Let’s crack on with the highlights.
Heralding from Cambridge, The Swamptruck Goodtime Band delivered some thumpin’ numbers in their eccentric blend of Americana, Bluegrass and Country, fronted by wild yet cuddly Yeti-man Alasdair Taylor who handed out anecdotes about playing at a millionaire’s mansion and offered life lessons on how every folk band must have a ‘killing song’ or ‘murder ballad’ if they are to be considered worth their salt.
I should mention the majestic and powerful Rhiannon Giddens. Decked out in a bright yellow woodcut-print skirt, black corset and jacket, she glistened in a spotlight as if caught in amber. She stirred blues, jazz and country together and seemed to emanate more energy than is possible to contain in a single human. When she wasn’t dancing with full abandon, she was belting vocals that were as sweet as treacle and as sad as a funeral song, or playing her violin so ferociously that the horse hairs from the bow were snapping off comically. Just when we started to think that she was indestructible, she said “Someone give me some water, I’m so sweaty I’m near about to slip out of this here corset!” Oh, and as if she weren't multi-talented as it was, Giddens also guest-curated the festival so half of the venue’s best had been cherry-picked by her jazzy hands. Of course, it wouldn’t be the festival experience without a white guy in a colonial suit behind us interrupting At the Purchaser’s Option to shout “Sanctify sister!” at the top of his lungs. Such is festival life.
Then, the moment it had all been leading up to: Patti Smith. An ethereal presence. As she sang she un-braided her waist-length plaits and shook them out. The lights caught her white hair in a shock of pink. She began Gloria, then stopped. Abrupt. “Cut the smoke machines. I’m not fucking Metallica.” Laughter. Then, by way of apology: “I actually like Metallica, I’m just not them.”
In a beautiful tangle of grace and bolshiness Patty made no apologies, in equal measures seducing us and showing a fearless grit. Her hands trailed the air like phosphorescent jellyfish and just when you were near as darn-it mesmerised, she would clear her throat and spit directly onto the speakers. She, as with many of the acts before her, seemed genuinely touched by the spunkiness of festival-goers and treated us to a sparkling rendering of Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall in a welcome break from her punk-rock roots. Some heart-felt moments were imparted upon the audience, from a spoken-word narration of the three wise men in honour of the Dutch painting held in King’s College, to dedicating the song Because the Night to “my boyfriend in 1976, my husband in 1980, the father of my children, the late and great Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith.”
There are so many more. Should I mention the fierce Scottish quartet The Poozies, with their disgustingly delicious track Soaking in the Bath, that featured the oh-so-catchy refrain of “Wrinkly skin, wrinkly skin, wriiiiinklyyyy skiiiiiiiiiiin”? Or First Aid Kit who almost rocked the glorified marquee Stage 1 to the ground (“If you like harmonies and head-banging, then this is the song for you”), or the wonderfully vibrant and funky Songhoy Blues who blended old school rock ‘n’ roll with traditional Malian folk in the vein of Ali Farka Touré?
Festival experiences are made from chance encounters and random cosmic connections with strangers. A few deserve a brief mention. One such individual was Jim Butler, a print-maker running workshops whose painstaking freehand ink sketch of the Songhoy Blues quartet I accidentally sprayed foam on from a beer can. Jim, I am truly sorry. Another was Becky Streater who ran the Library of Flowers in the market and who took the time to tell us about the vegan resin she uses to preserve the leaves and flowers in her jewellery and the personal story behind each plant collected and fossilised.
Only at Cambridge Folk would you hear the MC ask people in the front rows to roll up their picnic blankets to make space for those at the back. Only at Cambridge Folk would the waves of camping chairs create a bastion so dense and so utterly impenetrable that specially designated sections for decking had to be aerosolled onto the grass. Only at Cambridge Folk would the arena be so packed full of wonderfully weird individuals. Folk music is somehow both one of the most traditional and rapidly evolving of art forms and seems to have an endless stream of tricks and permutations up its sleeve and so there was never a boring moment. You must go. A true hum-dinger of a festival, as much made by its people as its artists.
