Folk That: Flat Lake Festival Springs A Leak
Our summer has been well and truly ruined with two of our favourite festivals cancelled. Boo, and indeed, hiss.
Greg McAteer, 05 Jun 2012
I don’t come down off the mountain much, so occasionally my good friends at Hot Press will tie a bundle of CDs up in brown paper and bailer twine and send them up here. Which is nice, because in this day and age of Dropbox and YouSendIt, I don’t get very many CDs. I miss them. I’m a sentimentalist at heart and I love those little round shiny plastic critters. Also, I like to listen to a new record uninterrupted in the car, and I’m a long way off being able to afford a modern enough car to boast an MP3 player.
One thing is for sure: my take on what constitutes folk is seriously out of date. Either that, or people just have no notion as to what on earth the genre is about. Some definitions, admittedly, are straightforward.
Traditional music is, and should be after all, traditional. What I refer to as folk music does not necessarily include, for the record, any band which happens to have an acoustic guitar or banjo. Mumford & Sons are not folk, they’re Evanescence with a banjo. I feel better getting that off my chest!
Good folk doesn’t have to be lavishly put together or obsessed with perfection. Stand up and take a bow Vickers Vimy: your vocals may occasionally quake, but you write some lovely songs and you exude a gorgeous vitality.
Theirs of course isn’t the only record I’ve received recently that has lifted the furrows on my brow. I’ve mentioned Rose Cousins before. She pops over on a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ mini-tour late June with gigs in Galway’s Roisin Dubh (June 28), DeBarra’s in Clonakilty the evening before and what promises to be the jewel in the crown, a Monday night gig in Whelan’s in the round with Juliet Turner and Orlagh de Bhaldraithe.
Gigs by Ms. Turner are now something of a rarity, and Orlagh de Bhaldraithe takes it to an entirely different level as she readies herself to put her second album onto the market after a gap of a mere 11 years. In the interests of fairness I should point out that she’s not exactly Rip Van Winkle, she does have a job as musical director of Macnas to keep her busy.
Greg McAteer
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