Cropredy Festival, Mischa Macpherson and transcendental interstices, + excellent breakfast at the village hall.

Health warning: this one's about music, and is no less opinionated than usual... Ed.)

 Back from Cropredy, Fairport Convention's annual bash, bigger and in some ways better some ways not, than ever. Here's the bill of fare:

Much more to a festival than the line-up, of course. I'm not sure how many more years I'll be able to get alternately roasted and soaked. I look with envy at festivals that have huge marquees...but you can't get 20,000 people in one marquee, and there is a togertheness about Cropredy which is very special. (Apart from people who can't hold their drink and don't care about the music or the people round them; not so many of those, but enough, down the front at least. Those people are not together in any sense.)

Then there's the toilets (above festival par, but par isn't all that high) and the food stalls, with plenty of good stuff, some of which continues to contest the territory with the ageing system long after it's been paid for and consumed. See toilet comments. But nice showers - with huge queues.

It was a sell-out year - which is lovely in many ways, but crowdwise, a bit much at peak times.

(stop bloody grumbling and get to the music - Ed.)

Someone wrote somewhere (and that's the standard of your underpinning references? - Ed.) that we look for transcendental moments in the interstices of a song.  Between lyrics and intrumental patterning, musical form and expression, we find something difficult to describe but which feels "right," like coming home, like being entirely here and now.

When the Australian Pink Floyd tribute band (yes, tribute band - don't sneer till you've seen them and then you can try sneering) launched their set with "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," full-length, I had such moments. I'm no Floydhead, mostly missed them first time around, but this was very beautiful music. I was - sent, as people used to say. Where, I don't know. That's the point.

But for me the best music was from some of Cara Dillon's set, much of Capercaille's, and all of the Mischa Macpherson Trio's set.

Mischa who?

Go here:  http://www.mischamacphersontrio.com/ 

or better still, try to catch them live. She has a lovely natural stage presence, they all play superbly, they are all very young, given the standard of their prowess.

They are from the Hebrides/Western Highlands, I believe, source of many a lovely voice. There were moments (OK, interstices, if you like) when the instruments shifted a little under the voice, and though I have not a word of the Gaelic, IT happened. 

So Cropredy '14 was billed as a prog rock-ish, Chas and Dave sort of festival, but for me the timeless/present moment moments were either Scots or Irish (Cara D.) Coincidental, perhaps.

Chas and Dave? Huge fun, loved 'em.

Huge self-important guitar-screaming prog rock? Gertcha!

And Fairport were Fairport, bless 'em endlessly. What is more heart-lifting than to hear them swing into "Walk A-While" and think "well, they're still doing it and I'm still here, so all is well for a while at least."

 Thanks, lads. Look after yourselves and keep doing it!

Cropredy Mindfulness

I've been drying out, over the last couple of days, after my visit to Fairport Convention's Cropredy Festival, at the village of that name near Banbury. (If those names mean nothing to you, other perhaps than "Banbury," I'll add a brief paragraph at the end of this post to whet your appetite...)

The Met Office were heroically incomepetent on this occasion, forecasting light showers and dry periods Thursday, and cloudy with sunny spells for Friday and Saturday. In fact, the showers were heavy and frequent right through the weekend, which made many of us cross because we came underprepared. On Saturday night there was a torrential downpour complete with lightning. The site turned muddy and a bit squalid (though nothing like Glasto mudbaths of yore.)It really would help if all us peace and love newagers stopped dropping litter into the mud.. but that's another story.

Festivals are a strange and interesting environment to me, but I'll get to the point soon, so for now, just to say that the intense throng (only 20,000, but a small arena), the evil weather, and middle-class late-middle-aged neuroses about the best time to visit the chemical toilets, (really not so bad, comparatively speaking) how to keep relatively clean in the mud, how to eat something nice that didn't cause repeat visits to aforesaid loos,anxiety over the integrity of the tent, combined to produce in your reporter a fine mix of tension and exhilaration.

How to maintain a degree of balance and calm, so as to get the most from this event?

Mindfulness.

Not easy in this context, but I can report a couple of modest successes. One brief period where I managed to feel entirely in the present moment, in my tent, at a safe distance from Rick Wakeman - only about five or ten minutes, trying to think only of my breathing, bringing my thoughts back every time they strayed. Seemed to help a bit.

Another moment: after a splendid breakfast at the village hall (what lovely people)I wandered into the large and beautiful old church and sat down. As my regular reader will know, I am not a Christian, but one would have to be exceptionally insensitive not to find in such a place an inherited calm, the result of centuries of ritual, spirituality, tranquil thought. It was not difficult to be present and undistracted in there. Not for long, though - a little girl came in with her dad, she just wanted to see what was inside. All fine. I didn't feel like shutting these people out, so "hello," and on with the day.

A different moment - the excitement of being close to Bellowhead at full throttle. Totally absorbing, and in a sense entirely present, but not the reduction of thought and feeling that you get from mindful meditation. So - a different sort of presentness.(Have you seen them? Dangerously good, brilliantly theatrical, unique.)

Lastly, in the middle of what to me was, I'm afraid, a horrible "Celtic" rock "opera" (sorry boys) about King Arthur - the storm and rain smote us. Just when I was deciding that I would never attend another outdoor festival, and wishing all heavy rock guitarists eternal incarceration in sound-proof rooms, IT happened with my doing almost nothing: instead of grumbling about what should be/might have been/won't be/wasn't, I was there, not caring about what might happen, not categorising or assessing the experience, just being there, with these people, now. I held on to that for a bit. It felt like freedom to me.

Then the Arthurians cleared off, Fairport were left to their own excellent devices, we had "Matty Groves," "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" (I get closer to tears with that as the years go by, a moment of finely-wrought sentiment) and finally and forever, "Meet On The Ledge."

Brief moments of mindfulness that enriched the weekend and helped me to get the most from it. Not the regular meditation set-up, just the best I could do on the hoof. It still helped.

I'll try to write abit more about this business of being in the present, another time.

Note: Fairport Convention - the band that more or less started the "electric folk" or "folk rock" genre. Many lineups down the years, and some truly exceptional talents (Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Simon Nicoll, Daves Pegg and Swarbrick)they can play and have played almost anything. "Folk" is a pallid term for this music. They have run a festival in the Oxfordshire village of Cropredy, near Banbury,for thirty years. They have an excellent relationship with the village. (The festival originated in a scratch gig at the village fete - two of the band lived there then.) The festival is limited in size, very well-organised, has a very wide range of music (this year brilliant jazzer Martin Taylor, young traditional guns Breabach from Scotland, singer/songwriter Thea Gilmour, Mabon from Wales, Status Quo for goodness' sake, Little Feat, Fairport themselves etc etc - so not really just a folk festival but plenty of folk, folkesque and traditionally-derived music. Very good value at £85 or so. No or very little crime, and so far as I could see, no drunken fights etc. A powerful tradition of meeting up with friends year after year. If you don't want to camp, you can B&B in banbury. If you've a narrowboat, it's on a canal. Excellent and very large bar - Wadsworth's 6X. Nicely sloping arena field. If you want to know more, go to FC's website. If you're already bored - sorry. Even funerealists and would-be meditators have to let their hair down sometimes...