Sunrise 2012

By any standard, this year's Sunrise Celebration ought to have been a disaster.

We awoke on the first night to find someone had tried to get into our tent (and that in the supposedly secure Crew Camping field); twenty minutes later they tried again, my "what the fuck" being greeted with an unconvincing "oh sorry mate, wrong tent." Morning confirmed foul play. Many had had their valuables nicked - by a stroke of luck ours were locked in the car.

Then I lost a day to a particularly vicious migraine.

And then there was the rain. Torrential, unremitting rain. And when there's rain at a festival there's mud. Fields of pristine grassland turn quickly to puddled clay, a sticky syrup of tiramisu that sucks at your boots and your spirits and gets in everything, on everything, under everything, until all differences are erased in homogenous brown. Try walking in it without slipping. Try dancing in it. Try keeping your spirits up when your clothes are damp, your socks are wet, you feel the first bite of a stinking cold, and then someone accidentally walks off with your wellies (thankfully theirs were dry and a good fit too).

But oddly, we managed. In fact, it was one of the most inspiringly, life-affirming and heartening festivals I've ever been to (and I've been going for twenty five years). I'd do it all again tomorrow.

We saw some great music: the Warsaw Village Band, The Egg, Green Angels, Duncan Disorderly & the Scallywags. Celtech played a blinder on the main stage and even brought the sun out.

We went raving in the Solar Dance stage and danced like it was 1987 (well, not Nomi - she would have been 3). The music and lasers were mind-bendingly good.

I gave a talk on the Judaeo-Christian notions of time underlying much of the current 2012 millenarianism (as you do), and gently argued the case for a more pagan, spiracular framework for thinking about psychedelics (if you're interested, a version of the talk is coming out in a book later this year - more soon). It seemed to go down well.

But really, what made the festival so good was the chance to reconnect with alternative culture, with different ways of living, thinking, doing, making, and, yes, playing. It gets lonely out here. We all need to recharge.

There were some truly inspiring talks (about which I shall blog later) and a lot of creative beauty. Here's one example, a tent with a load of candles in. Very nice. But then we learned that these were peace flames. Someone lit a candle from the smouldering fires of Hiroshima and that flame has been kept alight ever since in the name of peace, in the hope that it might never happen again. There are peace candles burning continuously around the world. Suddenly a beautiful night sculpture took on a whole new level of meaning. I found it profoundly moving.

What little sun there was was short lived and on Saturday night a storm front moved in. All bands were cancelled on the main stage. It rained for twelve hours solid. I'd be lying if I said we didn't feel utterly miserable, curled up in our little tent, trying to sleep amidst the booming lurch of dubstep and the squish-pop-ah! of people doing balloons. Come the morning there were now great lakes of mud and a river of refugees wanting out and heading for home. They should have stayed. By mid morning the sun came out again and a fine, dry wind blew up from the south west. It felt like a blessing, a reward for our perseverance. We lazed in the new stone circle, drinking chai, letting ourselves go gently pink in the sun.

Wod played on the Sunday evening, in the new, specially provided dance tent, with a proper sprung floor lovingly made by Rob the Farmer (to whom much gratitude is due). It was a small, intimate gig, but nonetheless intense. People were sat outside too, listening as they watched the sunset.

We left shortly afterwards, ready for home, but with that bitter sweet feeling of wanting and not wanting to go. The festival always has to end but I suppose we take some of it away with us, and I don't mean the mud.

The Way of the Morris and Barleymow

Telling the Bees played at Lunar Festival a couple of weekends ago, and despite the biblical weather it was a fine festival indeed with some excellent music. We sheltered from the deluge in the cafe tent and while we were there a video started up in the background. Despite the noise, kerfuffle and general distractions of a festival, we all found ourselves steadily drawn into watching it. It was Tim Plester's beautiful documentary, Way of the Morris, all about the fall and rise of the Adderbury side.

Adderbury is a small village about twenty miles north of Oxford. It's famous for its red sandstone buildings and for the medieval carvings of musicians on the side of its church, one of which is a fine bagpiper.

But it's also famous for its morris side. Barring one sole survivor, who couldn't bear to dance again, the side was obliterated during World War I at the Battle of the Somme. It was revived in the 1970s by a group of proud locals, buoyed up on a heady mix of Fairport Convention and Hook Norton Ale, who were determined to find the original earthy dance lurking behind the morris-lite pickled and preserved by Cecil Sharp.

Using wonderful archive Super-8 film footage, the film charts how they succeeded, and it tells the story of a recent pilgrimage to the Somme to honour their fallen predecessors. But making the film proves to be a journey for Plester too. His father was one of those enthusiastic revivalists, yet embarrassment meant he never danced himself. Over the course of the film he gradually comes to terms with what he realises is an essential part of his heritage. It's beautiful to watch.

And, needless to say, the film is about so much more: Englishness, identity, the effects of war, seasonality, life, death and continuity, rootedness and tradition. It's very moving and I can't recommend it enough. Don't be put off if you saw the toe-curling Morris: A Life with Bells On. This is the real deal.

I've also been watching some of the many short films brought together on the DVD, Here's a Health to the Barleymow, released by the BFI.

Here you'll find records of many of Britain's odd folk customs, from 1920s silent footage of Cecil Sharp morris dancing, through to Alan Lomax's 1953 film of the Padstow May Day celebrations, Oss Oss Wee Oss. Barbaric, strange and downright nonsensical at the best of times, our weird folk customs are given an added poignancy by the vintage nature of the footage: in the words of one Padstownian, almost everyone you're watching has gone west. The traditions, however, remain, which is why they matter.

Highly recommended for all lovers of the strange.

Go fly a kite

During the recent spell of sunny weather (remember that?) I turned out a kite, a forgotten gift, from the bottom of a cupboard. What could be a finer way to spend an afternoon? I took off to Port Meadow, a golden sea of buttercups, and indulged myself.

Like so many kids growing up in the 70s, I once had a Peter Powell dual control stunt kite (Peter Powell, if memory serves, was a Devon man too). I had plenty of fun with it, at least when not crashing it to the ground in a tangle of tears and string and broken spars, but these days power kites, as they have been renamed, have little appeal.

Power kites are all about control, or perhaps, the illusion of control. I sometimes watch people flying them on the meadow but whether the wind is so strong that they're nearly blown off their feet, or so flukey that the kite crumples and refuses to play, there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of skill in it. They always seem to stand in inappropriate places, in the lea of trees or buildings, where the wind shadow is long, yanking the lines this way and that, trying to bend the kite and the wind to their will. Rarely do they succeed. There's not much listening going on (though granted kite-surfing is another matter).

No, for me, it's the single-line kite that does it. Admittedly, the nylon sled-kite I retrieved from my cupboard doesn't take a whole lot of skill either - it pretty much flies itself - but you still have to play out the line when the gusts come, and draw it in again when they recede. You have to feel the wind. But there are single-string kites that you can learn to move up and down or left and right. All require skill, yes, but also a kind of zen, a letting go. Relinquish any idea of control and the kite rises. Oh the metaphor!

And don't kites just lend themselves to metaphor? They punctuate the sky, return it to a human scale. They hug the wind. Our minds can't help but follow them up into the empyrean; watching them, we expand. As with the wind, we animate them, for they move like creatures. They tug and pull against their earthly bonds, yearning for freedom, but only death would follow their release.

Kites delight so no wonder restrictive cultures have, at times, banned them. Imagine what would happen if we all bunked off work for the afternoon and went kite-flying instead?

The next time someone barks at me to 'go fly a kite' I shall receive it as a benediction.

Little Galicia

Who'd have thought it? Oxford is home to a thriving Galician diaspora and they were out in force this week for the first of what I hope will be many music sessions at the James Street Tavern. Galicia is the north west peninsula of Spain, and, like their Atlantic cousins in Brittany and Cornwall, Galicians have a strong regional and musical identity. Their bagpiping tradition stems from the Middle Ages and is unbroken.

The session was organised by Mano Panforreteiro, a fine piper (gaitero) and musician - regular readers will have spotted him in the Whirly Band. When time allows we get together and play pipes in Mansfield College Chapel, a rare treat.

I stupidly forgot my camera but I did take some field recordings which I think capture the sun-baked atmosphere of the night. There was singing and dancing and someone even brought a plate of very potent sausage and even more potent cheese. That's how a session should be.


Foliada de Tenorio

Muinera Spanish Jig

Tune-spotters amongst you will notice that the last tune is Spanish Jig, introduced into the English session repertoire by the band Blowzabella. I'd always assumed that the tune was Galician but Mano had never heard it. He plays it now, however, and consequently it may very well find its way back to Iberia. As the old saying goes, love and music need no passports.