A Shirt on Sunday: Shrewsbury Folk Festival 2019

While I was staggering around Bloodstock camp-site one morning in early August, I got a text asking if I was free in two weeks’ time to take some photographs. At that point, I barely knew my plans for the next two minutes, so I agreed to whatever it was… Thus it was that on the Saturday morning of the August Bank Holiday weekend I hurtled up the M40, executed the traditional slingshot manoeuvre around Birmingham, and came to rest in Shrewsbury, at the West Midlands Showground, there to partake in one of the country’s finest folk festivals.

Shrewsbury (nee Bridgnorth) Folk Festival launched in 1997 and has grown into a four-day extravaganza with three large stages, a morris dancing stage, and a dance tent that has no truck with electronica. I’d not been to it before, as that weekend has in the last few years involved boating along the Thames and other less musical activities.

I camped in a cow shed. Being an agricultural showground, the site is full of places to store livestock, and out the back are rows of peaked roofs where you would park your cows, had you brought any. This excellent for camping as there’s lots of shade, the ground is level and if it had rained, it wouldn’t have been a major issue. There were also proper toilet blocks and many water points, so this was a good start.

Photo by Geraint Evans, who was writing words to go with the pictures

The problem was the photographer’s tabard. This was one of the hottest weekends of the year and the last thing I needed was an extra layer of clothing. I spent all day sweating like a sweaty thing, drinking more water than beer. Plus, (in a blue that is not my colour) the tabard marked one out - very clearly, that being the point of it - as part of the organisation. During the weekend I fielded criticisms about the weather, the music, the fact that the dance tent was too close to where some bloke had camped (eh?), and even on the difficulty of photographing some of the artists.

That last bit was true as one of the tents was fetching blue and yellow stripe, but while the blue was solid, the yellow was not, to so the inside of the tent was bathed in a sickly light coming from a stripey sky. The other photographic negative (sorry) was acute gear-envy. I’m a reasonable photographer, and have a decent, but not flash Nikon DSLR, fitted with a zoom lens suitable for most of what I want. Now I was encountering professional and semi-pro photographers, whose first action upon meeting is to size up your gear. There was guy with a double shoulder-holster arrangement, and another with three cameras dangling around his neck. All of them had lenses you’d take on a safari, and I was just pottering around with a camera bag and a Bloodstock-branded plastic pint glass. It’s all a matter of priorities, and the beers were very fine.

Of course, the good bit about wielding a press pass and a nasty blue tabard is that you can wander around the site and only get stopped if you try to get out on stage. Want to check the view from up on that building? Up you go. Want to get into the pit in front of the stage? Just this way, sir. And so I spent three days (I’d had to work the Friday) stomping around the site, taking photos and absorbing a ridiculous amount of music.

The musical highlights were…

Michael Messer's Mitra - delta blues featuring tabla and Indian slide guitar

Edgelarks -new branding for excellent duo Phillip Henry and Hannah Martin

Martin Joseph - English songwriter channelling Bruce Springsteen

Iota - Sally Barker, Anna rYDER & Marion Fleetwood delivering great music and incredibly funny banter

Birds of Chicago - 3-piece duo delivering blues-y Americana

Martin Barre - the ex-Tull guitarist delivered what he hadn’t in previous gigs I’d seen: two hours of pure Jethro Tull, delivered with gusto and the minimum of self-indulgent prog-jazz faffing around.
I finished my musical weekend with the ever wonderful Faustus and then tried to return my tabard.

Even before the weekend, the lady who issued the tabards had threatened unspeakable torments for anyone who didn’t return theirs; we’d had to sign them out and were expected to sign them back in on the Sunday. But by Sunday afternoon the organisers had cleared the office, leaving a skeleton crew to handle the last few hours and no-one knew anything about signing in tabards. In the end a nice person just wrote me down in the log book, and as no torments have befallen me in the last few weeks, I think I’m safe.

It was a fun weekend, but a lot of work. I took over 2,600 photographs over about 36 hours across three days and spent as long again culling them down to a mere 478 for the web site I was working for. You can find them here: https://www.efestivals.co.uk/festivals/shrewsburyfolk/2019/galleries.shtml