Friday 1 September 2017

Mounting the air at Shrewsbury Folk Festival

Shrewsbury Folk Festival 2017 -Sunday 27 August 2017


It's two years since we were last at the Shrewsbury Folk Festival, back in September 2015, when Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita performed on a typical rain-drenched English Bank Holiday weekend. This year we were blessed with a warm and dry day, though the atmosphere was perhaps a little subdued, the festival mourning the loss of founder and co-director Alan Surtees, who established the event twenty years ago and sadly died in June.

We came for the Sunday only, mainly to see our old favourites The Unthanks and Seth Lakeman. Before this, though, we witnessed an unexpected highlight in the Pengwern Marquee in the form of the fantastic - but alas ephemeral - National Youth Folk Ensemble. This group of teenagers had spent just four weeks learning a dazzling set of tunes which they played with great confidence, skill and obvious enjoyment.

After an early evening lull in the music we gathered in the Bellstone Marquee where The Unthanks performed, as the end-of-summer sunset seeped through the entrances and exits. With songs like 'Magpie', 'Mount the Air' and 'What Can a Song Do to You?' – and augmented by trumpet, string quartet, drums and bass – they delighted and thrilled as always. 

Loudon Wainwright III is an acquired taste (and one I'm afraid I still haven't acquired), but he offered up his trademark mixture of irreverent, cynical songs and anecdotes on guitar, piano and ukulele, ending his set with 'The Swimming Song'.  


Finally, for us, Seth Lakeman gave a breathless and blistering show, the lights perfectly synchronised with his mesmerising fiddle playing, while his amazingly talented band managed to keep pace, looking like a bunch of delighted kids on a musical roller-coaster ride. Folk music can sometimes be surprisingly loud, surprisingly fast and very exciting indeed. 

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Tony Gillam is a writer, musician and blogger based in Worcestershire, UK. For many years he worked in mental health and has published over 100 articles and two non-fiction books. Tony now writes on topics ranging from children's literature to world music and is a regular contributor to Songlines magazine.