From: dahe@cl.cam.ac.uk (David Elworthy)
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk
Subject: Cropredy
Date: 18 Aug 92 12:03:32 GMT
Reply-To: dahe@cl.cam.ac.uk (David Elworthy)
Organization: U of Cambridge Computer Lab, UK

Well, Cropredy... This was the third year I've been, and certainly the
muddiest. I rained torentially on Thursday and Saturday night,
fortuitously holding off (more or less) until the end of the Fairport
set. I heard that one of the organisers said it was the biggest yet -
25000 people compared to 23000 last year. So what was it like?

Friday started with the usual sacrificial lamb, a band called The Wright
brothers who are to modern folk rock what the Wright flier is to modern
aviation. Well, this is a little unfair, but they were just
uninteresting: a long series of songs that sounded much the same. Once
they'd been sent off the stage to the sound of their own footsteps, it
was time for Richard Thompson, doing the solo acoustic set that he's
been touring with. And jolly damn good it was too: he has amazing guitar
skill. Both his playing and his voice are quite different from anyone
else I've heard - a really original performer and a great songwriter.
Then it was on to the first Fairport set. Normally they only play on the
Saturday night, but this time they did an extra set for the Friday, with
a rather larger amount of work from the solo albums. Chris Leslie of
Whippersnapper substituted for Ric Sanders, who put in some appearances
playing tambourine and (one-handed) piano. Leslie was a good choice: in
my opinion he's a far better fiddler than Sanders, whose style I
increasingly find unimaginative. There were two guests for the evening:
Julianne Regan, and then near the end Robert Plant. Apparently, he's
often at Cropredy, but usually won't come up on stage. His voice is as
sensual and electrifying as ever, and he has tremendous presence. You
could almost hear the crowd swoon as he came on.

The Saturday line up began with Skin The Peeler, a new and good band led
by a Frenchman who was practically a caricature of Frenchness ("Thank
you ma friends. Ze next song is for ze donkeys, because zey are ma
friends and I love zem.") Jerry Donahue's The Backroom Boys were next,
followed by Four Men And A Dog. 4MD are a band who just don't come
across on record (any folk band that does doesn't deserve tha name), and
it was good to see them live. I last saw them at the 1991 Cambridge Folk
Festival, when they were totally engrossing. This time they were less
good, but still got most of the crowd dancing, a real feat of feet in
the hot sun. Wolfstone followed, another folk-rock band, veering more to
the rock than the folk. Then it was time for the masters: Carthy and
Swarbrick, and on into the four hour Fairport set. It was roughly
chronological, with the line-up changing as they brought on their
guests: Jerry Donahue, Swarb, Richard Thompson, Vicki Clayton, and many
more. There was a lot of good stuff in this, such as Swarb and Thompson
together, but somehow the set was a disappointment. In past Cropredys,
I've found the Saturday night to be just wonderful - by the end there's
that intense and elusive feeling of the crowd being a single entity.
This year, it didn't quite seem to work, and I'm not sure why. The
chronological ordering meant that they couldn't warm the crowd up and
then floor them with one of the big set pieces as they usually do.
Somehow the whole thing just didn't cohere.

So I came away from Cropredy this year with a bit of a feeling of "So
what?" It was good, but it didn't leave me feeling "wow"ed and changed
into a different person, as last year's Cropredy did. Of course it was
right to celebrate 25 years of the band, but I'm not sure this was the
way to do it.

-- david elworthy
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk