There is a kind of rite of passage associated with the Picnic now. It is the last celebration of summer. People go not just for the music, but to feel that strange and infectious sense of looseness and freedom that permeates the air at a good festival. Time stretches, and takes on a different rhythm and pace. There is so much to see and do, but nothing that you have to, or not really anyway.
The music is the main thing and there was a lot of good stuff around this year for sure, but Picnic has the added attractions down to a T: the art installations, the theatre, the Leviathan Tent, the Literary Stage, the Body and Soul arena, the Hot Press Chat Room. There is food of a different calibre too, with great stalls from Diep Noodle Bar, Slow Food Ireland and Rathmullen House to name just three.
There’s mobile massage, a Ferris Wheel for the kids and wheelbarrows for old fashioned rides! You can battle your way up to the front when things get hot in the Electric Arena, or chill at the equivalent of a sidewalk café and people-watch. Electric Picnic is the human zoo at its best.
It had never really rained properly in Stradbally before when the festival was on, and so this year was different. The week beforehand was wet as a fishing village in Donegal in the depths of winter and so the underfoot conditions were messy, but you could still get around the site without having to wade through anything too drastic.
There were moments when it was like a frontier town in one of those old Western movies when the rain comes teeming down, with hundreds of people in a small area slip-sliding around one another through the gloopy mud. But the spirits remained high, no one seemed to be over-doing it too brutally on the gargle and there was always a new special pleasure to treasure, waiting around the corner.
The Hot Press massive had fun this year, with some brilliant highs in the Chat Room. There was Mundy doing ‘Strawberry Blood’ and ‘Healthy’ in a deliciously intimate setting while Peter Murphy fired questions at the Birr songster. There was Tommy Tiernan being typically hilarious and risque, taking Olaf Tyaransen’s questions and using them as a diving board to leap into some deeply surreal waters.
There was Damien Dempsey, as honest as the day’s long and as direct, ratcheting up the sense that we have all been hoodwinked and cheated (as we have) with ‘Celtic Tiger’. And there was Laura Izibor, beautiful, modest, lovely and thoroughly unaffected by the success she has achieved to date.
You got a sense in so many different ways at Electric Picnic of the extraordinary capacity that music holds to beguile and to transfix: the enthusiasms that people feel but don’t always fully understand, the instinctive things that artists do in their pursuit of the transcendental, the rhythms that brook no refusal, the melodies and harmonies that take root in your subconscious and lodge themselves till they almost seem to have become part of you.
And you got a sense too that we here on this small plot of land we call Ireland are good with the words and the music and the laughter and the debate and that it might not take a whole lot to harness these things better than we currently do, so that Irish artists might find their voices and take their art out there even more effectively, into the world, into the light.
You got a sense, finally, of the desperate – and ultimately counter-productive – betrayal it would involve if the arts were to be targeted for cuts and artists were to be starved in the fearful new Ireland that is emerging post-boom. It may, however, be heading in that direction...
Which is why it is so important to begin to get things in focus for the Music Show, which takes place over the first weekend in October in the RDS, in Dublin. To a large extent the event, which is run by Hot Press, is about the State of the Music Nation.
A lot of fascinating ground will be covered at the gathering, with musicians coming together to share their insights and experiences, as well as hopefully getting to grips with deeper questions – of identity, the purpose of art, issues about freedom of expression and copyright and lots more besides. All, that is, against a background of brilliant music on the Live Stage...
We were fortunate to have The Script launch the event for us at the Westin Dublin last week: quizzed by Stuart Clark, they provided a hugely informative and entertaining panel discussion of the kind that happens at the Music Show, before an audience of musicians, students and fans. Their generosity with their time has been mirrored by the response of others to the call of the Music Show. Christy Moore will do a Public Interview about his life and his work, his guitar to hand to pick up and play when the mood strikes him. Glen Hansard, of The Frames and Swell Season, Ireland’s recent Academy Award winning songwriter, will do the same. These are mini-events that every smart music fan will want to be part of.
The calibre of the people who will share their knowledge, and who will let other musicians in on the secrets of their trade over the two days, is extraordinary. I won’t give a full recital here, because to mention some and not others might seem disrespectful – but where else would you get Enya’s producer Nicky Ryan, the composer of a poker hand of James Bond scores David Arnold, documentary maker and musicologist Philip King, natural born star Sharon Corr and the great singer, songwriter and performer Paul Brady all under the one roof over a weekend, alongside bright new talents like Imelda May, The Coronas and RSAG?
The conference aspect of the Music Show will tackle the thorny subject of the internet, illegal downloading and the right of musicians to control their own creative output, with the CEO and Chairman of the IFPI, John Kennedy, who was the central witness in the Pirate Bay case in Sweden, and himself a lawyer of international standing, making a keynote contribution.
It will also cover two of the most pressing issues in the Irish arts arena today, namely The Attack on the Arts proposed by An Bord Snip and the question ‘Has Irish Music Lost Its Soul?’ These are important subjects, and the hope is that the entire music community will be emboldened and empowered by the discussions: to express themselves, to take the fight to the philistines and to realise their potential as musicians and players all the more fully.
In addition, leading artists, professionals and practitioners will give workshops and masterclasses with the wonderful Irish based UK session drummer Carlos Hercules, who works with The Waterboys, George Michael and Beverly Knight among many others, leading the charge.
Much more will be added after this issue of Hot Press goes to bed – but, even now, it promises to be an amazing weekend, in which anyone with an interest in music, and especially in playing music, should be desperate to take part.
And you know what? We have kept the ticket prices very low for precisely that reason. I’m beginning to look forward to it already. After the Picnic, and the end-of-summer feeling that accompanies it, we all need some fresh musical stimulus. Have no fear. The Music Show will provide it. Roll on the first weekend