It’s that time of year again – when many of the farm fields of Cropredy in Oxfordshire get transformed in to a festival city!.. and many things start arriving….The catering stalls, the gift stalls the brilliant Cropredy Bar, the toilets, the showers, the magical stage, the lighting, the fences, the roadways, the walkway path lights, the generators, and most importantly the love .. and the huge family that are Fairport Conventions loyal fans – generations of them… all convening for what is for most, a yearly pilgrimage to the legendary Fairport Conventions Cropredy Festival.
This years Cropredy Festival falls on the 8-10th August.
But this year it is with great sadness we mourn the loss of Fairport’s drummer Gerry Conway, who sadly passed away after a spell of illness from Moto Neurone disease in March. Gerry served as Fairport’s drummer from 1998 until 2022. A man that I became to know from my very limited occasions of meeting and interviewing him to be a kind wonderful, gentle warm hearted beautiful soul and exceptional musician.
Our thoughts, love and condolences are with his partner Jacqui and his family from all of us at the folking.com team.
Cropredy 2024 – spanning the generations..
This year especially reminds us of the multi generational ethos of the festival with the amazing Rick Wakeman, playing his Journey to the centre of the earth album live. This year he will be joined by his son Adam Wakeman another hugely talented and successful musician, on stage playing keyboards alongside his father for this very special performance.
In addition and again in line with the generations of great musicians, Rick Wakeman will also be joined by the brilliant bass player Mr Matthew Pegg – son of none other than Mr Dave Pegg. Matthew is a hugely talented bass player just like his father. Who despite his father Dave Pegg telling me in our latest interview (below) that he tried to encourage Matthew to become a dentist or something similar!! he ignored his fathers advice and has forged a brilliant successful career in the music industry playing with many bands including The City Funk Orchestra and Jethro Tull to name just two often stepping in to deputize on bass for Dave Pegg when he has been injured!
So the generations roll on in that living tradition that now spreads across multiple generations of the band itself as well as their friends, musical acquaintances and the families of the Fairport fans who flock to this magical festival – where the Fairport’s song ‘Meet on the ledge’ so perfectly captures ‘It all comes round again’ really rings true for this years Cropredy festival.
From a personal point of view I like I’m sure thousands of others will be joined this year by my two daughters, who grew up coming to the Cropredy Festival and are now bringing their children… so the generations keep rolling on!
So…the line up. So who can you see????
Fairport have have done it again!…what a fantastic line up for this year – and tickets are selling fast so ‘If you snooze you loose’ as they say so – visit www.fairportconvention.com to buy your tickets asap!
Other ‘generational legends’ performing this year are the brilliant time spanning entertainer Tony Christie.
You can hear me talking to Tony Christie about his appearance at the festival and other life matters including speed awareness courses! in my Pre – Cropredy Chat with Tony Christie here….
Also continuing Fairport’s constant commitment to championing new young bands at the festival there are several younger bands on the bill…among others a fiery, energetic and extremely talented band of Blues Rockers from my neck of the woods (Medway Towns in Kent)
The Zack Shultze Gang
Hear my pre Cropredy chat with Zack Schultze here..
Another catalogue of generational hits from the 80’s 90’s and beyond…will be played by the Brilliant Trevor Horn band!
If you have never been to the Cropredy Festival I can’t express what a special friendly, safe and comfortable festival this is, and always has an eclectic mix of music to suit all tastes, that Dave, Simon, Rick, Chris and Gareth the festival Manager / Director always bring. This is not just a folk or folk rock festival but a music festival that never ceases to amaze with its huge variety of music.
I only have to mention some of the past acts that have performed here over the years to give you an idea, past performances include The Buzzcocks, The levellers, The Proclaimers, The Water Boys, Petula Clarke, Madness, Toyah and Robert Fripp, Alice Cooper , Beach Boys, Level 42, Mark King, Marilion, Robert Plant, Solstice, Nile Rogers.. to name but a few and always topped off with stunning performances on Saturday night from those boys them selves Fairport Convention.
Cropredy will always surprise you, but never disappoint you !!!
So get those tickets booked August 8-10th www.fairportconvention.com
The folking.com crew will also be there bringing you the vibe and the magical atmosphere of the festival via our social media and any further back stage interviews with artists and bands I can bring you…
See you in that magical field…. 8th – 10th August
Paul Johnson
www.folking.com
NIGHT FLIGHT, Sam Holmes and Harry Phillips, release their new EP, English Noise, in early May. The title track, reflecting on the end of a relationship amid the bustle of life, has already graced these pages and that is followed by their current single, ‘Monster’. It’s a richly orchestrated song almost as big as ‘The Wheel’ with its delightful plinky piano.
It seems that MARY MIDDLEFIELD is Swiss although she sounds very English on her new eight-track EP, Poetry (For The Scorned And Lonely). It begins with the rocky ‘Sexless’, one of four tracks already released as singles, followed by the gentle, folky ‘Atlantis’, another former single. As a palate-cleanser comes a short guitar instrumental, ‘Allodynia’ before the pace picks up again with ‘Heart’s Desire’.
Inspired by a woman she met on a train journey who shared her story of recently losing her husband, making her fellow passengers laugh as well as offering words of wisdom, JESSIE REID self-releases the breathily sung, slow swaying ‘Your Story’, her acoustic guitar complemented by Scottish fiddler Essa Flett, the music drawing on the Celtic roots of her Scottish and Welsh grandparents.
BAZ EDMONDSON follows up his debut single with ‘Wills Fallow’, a laid-back picked guitar song which is augmented by strings. Baz says that the lyrics are very personal but the imagery seems somewhat disturbing – like one of those dreams in which you’re trying to get away to somewhere but never quite succeeding. It’s full of vultures, wolves and thorns, musically accomplished but still you want to look over your shoulder.
Shetlands folkie FREDA LEASK teams with Kris Drever who both produces and plays on her self-released ‘Old Man Of Madison’, a shufflingly strummed, Americana-tinged number about resilience and second chances (“Go somewhere or nowhere at all/Something or nothing, what will you do?”) inspired by meeting a man in Georgia with slave family roots, who once toiled in the region’s cotton fields, who declared, “I own them cotton fields now”.
As a taster for his forthcoming debut album, Something To Say, THE GLEEMAN releases what can only be described as a pure pop single, ‘Better Day’. The song bounces along full of the joys of a spring that “has finally sprung” as he sings about bluebells and barbecues. Brass comes in at the end to ensure that your toes are tapping.
The latest from DARIA KULESH, with an itchy percussive guitar from Jonny Dyer, Katrina Davies’s fiddle and Odette Michell on additional vocals, ‘Ataman’ (self-released) celebrates the life and spirit of Alyona of Arzamas, an 17th century Erzyan woman who defied the oppressive Tsarist state and the restriction of her gender to lead a rebel Cossack army of thousands as their Ataman. It’s twinned with her recent release ‘Homeland’ marking the 80th anniversary of the deportation of the Ingush and Chechens by Joseph Stalin.
The second of the live singles in partnership with BrumRadio leading up to the Night Of Glass show, DAN WHITEHOUSE teams with Brooklyn’s Max ZT on hammered dulcimer for the dreamy cosmic waltzing piano ballad ‘Why Don’t We Dance’, originally from his 2013 album Reaching For A State Of Mind.
‘Solitary Traveller’ is the first single from Proxy Music, an album of newly written songs by LINDA THOMPSON – the pun is obvious once you see the cover. This track features daughter Kami Thompson on a song that, in an odd way, harks back to the days of Hokey Pokey with the band imitating the rhythm of a fairground organ.
An early taste of his much anticipated new album Pathways, JULIAN TAYLOR releases ‘Weighing Down’, which, with a steady drum beat, guitar and Jim Hoke’s yearning pedal steel behind his warm baritone is a song of self-encouragement (“You’ve been so hard on yourself / It’s time to let things soften now“) and unburdening yourself from the pressure we put on our own shoulders because of things we think we’ve done wrong.
There’s been a spate of recent interpretations of the folk traditional ‘The Cuckoo’, one of the most interesting coming from London-based Italian-Australian folkie BITY BOOKER. An ornithological follow-up to ‘The Crow’ and again recorded (with excellent sound quality) on her tape machine at home and released digitally via her Freak Folk Records, with a restrained circling guitar pattern of courtly troubadour inclination and breathily airy vocals that take soaring flight on the curucucu refrain. A very pretty bird, indeed.
A ringing electric guitar opens ‘You Forgot To Speak’, the new single by ANI DIFRANCO, taken from her forthcoming album, Unprecedented Shit. It’s a weirdly fascinating arrangement with reversed tape effects and unexpected explosions of sound. The concept of “first sleep and second sleep” is particularly intriguing.
Inspired by the celebration of Hank Williams’ 100th birthday, Norwegian country rock outfit NILSEN’S SOUTHERN HARMONY joins forces with ANNE FAGERMO, the country’s 2024 Eurovision hopeful, for the joggingly strummed, harmonica-tinged country gospel duet ‘A House Of Gold’ (Coastal Sounds / Revolution Records) which, to a tune that sounds like a slowed down ‘Lone Highway’, has them echoing St Paul’s remark about camels, needles and heaven in the lines “People steal, they cheat and lie/For wealth and what it will buy/But don’t they know on the Judgement Day/That gold and silver will melt away?/I’d rather be in a deep, dark grave/And know that my poor soul was saved/Than to live in a house of gold/And deny my God and doom my soul”.
NITEWORKS are calling it a day after seventeen years together with a final tour beginning in November. Meanwhile they release their final single, ‘An Toll Dubh’, featuring the voices of Sian. They treat the Macdonald brothers’ song to a remarkably restrained electronic reworking until the end when they give it full measure.
Based in London and of Iraqi and Belarusian heritage, FLO PERLIN releases her first new music since 2021 with ‘Mother Tongue’ which, taken from her upcoming third album, Clay, and arranged for guitar, bass, strings and piano, is a dreamily swaying, acoustic jazzy folk musing on identity (“Watch us adapt in the strangest of ways/ watch us exist with the fears that we made… The house I knew was filled with doubt/The clothes I wore were inside out/Sometimes I ask, is it here where I’m from/Sometimes I ask what it means to belong”).
Their debut album, All For Something, due in late May, TINY HABITS, a Boston harmony trio who met at Berklee College of Music and comprises Maya Rae, Cinya Khan and Judah Mayowa, release the gorgeous but bittersweet hushed and pizzicato strings coloured ‘Wishes’ (Mom+Pop). Each of them contributing their own cathartic and confessional verse, it touches on family dynamics, body image, anxiety and people-pleasing.
Thirty-five years on since they acrimoniously broke up under the pressures of fame, Mark Nevin, Eddi Reader, Simon Edwards (and his guittaron)and Roy Dodds have buried the hatchets and reformed FAIRGROUND ATTRACTION, the first fruits of which come in the form of reunion single ‘What’s Wrong With The World’ (Raresong Recordings), a brushed snares and double bass shuffle that instantly recaptures their distinctive sound (and is melodically a bit like a slower ‘Perfect’) on a song about lies and deceit as (the knowing lyric containing the phrase about coming “face to face with my imperfection”) Reader sings “you can change the mirror but not the reflection” the title providing the catchy refrain.
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