THE gods smiled on Britain’s longest-running popular music event last weekend when drizzle gave way to hot sunshine. The Cambridge Folk Festival is one of the most smoothly organised events on the calendar, employing smart ideas that bigger rock fixtures would do well to replicate.
Most impressively, non-headline artists played two or three sets across the four-day festival, allowing even part-time punters to catch a wide cross-section of the bill. But the site also became uncomfortably crowded by the weekend, and is long overdue for expansion or relocation. The demand is clearly there.
The big buzz act of the smaller stages was the Waifs, an Australian trio whose already rising profile was boosted when Bob Dylan handpicked them to open his recent US tour. Fronted by sisters Donna and Vicki Simpson, they drew huge crowds with their honeyed twangs and freewheeling country rock. A more manicured and downbeat form of country came courtesy of Laura Cantrell, a rodeo sweetheart who could light up a desert highway with her aching voice and languid steel guitar.
Perhaps inevitably, for a festival grounded in traditional roots music, the main stage acts erred on the side of conservative. With his intricately strummed ballads and bittersweet observations, Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith brought a warm, low-key glow. But Mercury Prize nominee Eliza Carthy seemed clumsy as she mixed traditional English folk with reggae bass lines, rock guitars and music-hall humour. And Roseanne Cash’s polished country warblings were finely crafted, but lacked the grit and gravitas of her iconic father, Johnny.
Even Julian Cope, the festival’s official loose cannon, defied the lunatic promise of his unkempt Unabomber beard with a straight smattering of madcap minstrel ditties and monologues. All the above acts were rapturously received, as were homegrown legends Fairport Convention, standing in when family member Linda Thompson cancelled her solo set.
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The Afro Celts, fusing propulsive techno rhythms with multicultural instrumentation, rounded off Saturday with an ambitiously eclectic sound-and-light spectacle. But the crucial element lacking from the 2003 bill was edge.
It finally arrived late on Sunday, in the bearlike shape of Tennessee bruiser Steve Earle, whose stridently political set summoned up the angry spirits of protest-folk legends such as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.