On Saturday, I again wombled into town and watched the morris parade. It was brilliant to see a street full of morris dancing, all colour and music and bells. I then went to see Luke Daniels and The Gael Academy. The kids were pretty good and Luke Daniels is a very good melodoen player (although he doesn't seem to use the bases which I think is a very irish way of playing) but he wasn't the most charismatic talker between the tunes. No matter, his playing made up for it.
Then came Spiers and Boden. It was supposed to be Torivaki but, due to the whole icelandic volcano kerfuffle, they couldn't make it over from France. However, the same lack of flights also meant that Messers Spiers and Boden couldn't fly out to their gig in Austria so we got them instead. Well worth it. They were brilliant. Fantastic music, hilarious banter and a really enthusiastic audience made it a wonderful set.
Spent most of the afternoon sitting at the castle with a BFP (Bellowhead Forum Person) eating ice cream and watching the morris dancing. I especially liked Bristol Morris (which included the lad who'd tommyed for Bristol Rapper at DERT). Wasn't too keen on the rapper dancers we saw on the way to the castle mind. There were 2 sides dancing together, 1 male, 1 female with some very odd 'red indian' face paint'. The stepping (such as it was) was very peculiar, the spins used the irish stepping which you see a fair bit with american sides and produces very slow spins in rapper and the sword handling was, to say the least, wimpy. Made me feel so much better which, I suspect, makes me an evil gremlin.
We got chased out of the castle by the belly dancers who, while good, just went on for too long and were dancing to taped music which, after all the live stuff for the morris, just didn't cut it. So, after a brief pause to tell a passing Jon Boden how much we enjoyed the set, we hurried back to the Town Hall to get seats for The Demon Barber Roadshow. They were on really good form. The clogs, the morris, the rapper and the music all gelled together into one huge ball of energy which nearly had me stepping in my seat.
A fair few of BFP's then met up to go for tea at a nearby pub which was very nice but a bit slow which meant we didn't manage to get into the celidh which was a shame but we had a wander around the craft fair (where one of our number bought a rather splendid bowler hat decorted with cartoon character badges) before we headed off to the pub 'Far From the Madding Crowd for a few drinks before decamping to the campsite (so to speak).
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