Eamonn McCann: Stendhal Festival Delivers

You can’t get a burger ‘n’ chips for love nor money at Stendhal. Instead, they do food.

(Not snobbery. Have you ever had to leave a festival on the first day with a cauldron of explosive bile in your belly, such that when you give a little fart while recovering in bed later, it splatters all over the pillow?)

The Picnic isn’t bad for grub either. But Stendhal takes the Sweet Buttermilk Biscuit.

And also the prize for the best home-grown, organically-rooted bands. Plus, they allowed me to have a public conversation with Stuart Baillie about his brilliant, necessary book, Trouble Song.

What’s more to say? Apart from that Mean Mary, of whom I confess I’d been entirely unaware, plays the coolest banjo you’ve ever heard, as well as violin, guitar, keyboards and, like as not, the Hebridean bagpipe. Sings like a blues-inflected Dixie Chick.

Paddies Nash and Glasgow provided back-up vocals for the Wailers. The Wailers may have been oblivious to the North-West superstars weighing in, on account of the Paddies having taken up position towards the back of the crowd. But hell, all you had to do was to be in the vicinity. The Word Burning Savages proved (again) that they are ready for anything.

Leaving the site, it struck me that maybe Stendhal is a tad too wholesome. Lots of children scampering about, parents lolling around in groups, and, as far as I could see, nobody stretched out from drink, or a single punch thrown.

Then again, when I’ve seen such scenes in the past, I have tended to mutter “Bah!” and regret the rumpuses and ructions. Sure you wouldn’t know what to think sometimes.

I managed to miss And So I Watch You From Afar. We will soon put this right.

A DANGEROUS PLACE

Next night we trekked along the banks of Lough Foyle to Downhill Beach, which goes on forever, to hear Maxine Peake declaim a goodly chunk of Homer’s Odyssey in an open-sided tent, caressed by the whoosh and sigh of the waves rippling in from the Atlantic, the shriek and caw of the quire of gulls wheeling overhead, the stern magnificence of the Mussenden Temple perched perilously at the edge of the high cliff looming haughtily over all. The inscription around the Temple tells: “’Tis pleasant, safely to behold from shore/ The troubled sailor, and hear the tempests roar.”

Ms. Peake, probably the most beautiful woman in the world, recites the mellifluous verse of the Ancient Greek in soft, Lancastrian tone, the audience all in reverie, about 50 people who had broken off from jogging along the shoreline now circled around the tent, inquisitive, then perplexed, then lingering on, enraptured.

The most thrilling theatrical experience I’ve had since her Hamlet at Manchester’s Royal Exchange.

Next November, Ms. Peake’s latest film, Peterloo, directed by Mike Leigh, will be released. It’s the story of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, when cavalry charged with swishing sabres into a crowd of 60,000 demanding civil rights and extension of the franchise, slashing at least 15 demonstrators to death and wounding scores of others. (The site of the killings was dubbed ”Peterloo” in sarcastic reference to the English victory at Waterloo four years previously.)

Shelley’s poem ‘The Mask Of Anarchy’ opens with a characterisation of Lord Castlereagh, hero of Waterloo, Foreign Minister at the time of the Massacre: “I met Murder on the way/ He had a mask like Castlereagh/ Very smooth he looked, yet grim/ Seven blood-hounds followed him/ All were fat, and well they might/ Be in admirable plight/ For one by one, and two by two/ He tossed them human hearts to chew.”

Poets don’t write stuff like that anymore, about Bloody Sunday, Fallujah, or anywhere oppressive governments set out to kill off challenge.

At a commemoration rally on the site of the massacre on its 199th anniversary earlier this month, Ms. Peake declared: “We’re in a very dangerous place politically at the moment and protest is really important. We’ve got to remember our history to move forward.

“People say protest is defunct nowadays and I think that’s wrong. We need it more than ever, we need people physically coming together in events. I may be being a bit of a scaremonger, but I feel it might not be long before we have another Peterloo incident. You look at events like Grenfell and Hillsborough, where working-class people were ignored and disrespected by those in charge and there were huge cover-ups.” Rise like lions!

CRAZY PEOPLE

And onwards to the Green in Malin and another tent, this time of circus proportion, for the Henry Girls, with a set of Boswell Sisters songs. The Boswell Sisters are the greatest band hardly anybody today has heard of. They were the biggest-selling act in America in the 1930s, bar none, a close harmony jazz vocal group, singing in perfect time and harmonies, effortlessly changing key amidst reckless, helter-skelter arrangements. ‘Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter’, ‘Crazy People’ (like me go crazy over people like you), ‘Blue Moon’. Their 1934 recording of ‘Rock And Roll’ appears to have been the first time the phrase was ever used.

I doubt if there’s another band anywhere who’d dare try emulate them. But Joleen, Karen and Lorna pulled it off triumphantly. I sort of knew they would.

Summon the Boswells up on YouTube. Try ‘Crazy People’. Absolute perfection.