Ken is a veteran of all 34 Port Fairy Folk Festivals. “I was here at the start”, he said. “When there was only one stage and the local fish and chip shop used to bring everyone their dinner at 8pm. And look at it now, all organic tofu salads and gluten free vegan burgers”.
“But the music is better”, I ventured. “There is some good stuff”, Ken answered. “But Mary and I like the old reliables. Guys like Vic Garnutt and John McCutcheon who have been coming here for years and tell stories as well as sing songs. That’s the real folk tradition”.
Mary put down her knitting momentarily. “We have a simple method of deciding what we like. If it’s a guy with a grey beard and a guitar, we’ll give him a listen. We don’t care so much for the women. Some of them have good voices, but they are not as funny. We come here for a good laugh as much as anything else”.
Ken reckoned the best festival was in 1979. That’s when the folkie chairs became popular and nobody had to sit on the damp grass anymore. We had almost turned up without chairs, which would have been a social embarrassment on a scale of using a fish knife to spread your butter while dining with the Queen of England. Luckily, a canny shopkeeper just outside Port Fairy was alert to this danger and was selling folkie chairs at $22 a go.
I was instructed to try one out before confirming the purchase. I’m ungainly enough when it comes to getting out of bed and that only requires an ability to swivel your legs to the side, so I approached the chair with some trepidation. The problem is that folkie chairs have no back legs and to be honest, the front ones aren’t anything to write home about either. The seat rests about six inches above the ground and the smallest amount of pressure applied to the wrong part of the chair’s delicate frame will leave you rolling around on the ground like a beached whale.
As the weekend went on, I became a bit of an expert on the correct entry and exit procedures for folkie chairs and sought out other festival virgins to offer my advice (the secret is to apply pressure to the front bar only) but I live in fear of my earlier attempts finding their way onto YouTube.
It’s not only the performers at folk festivals who have grey beards; most of the audience do too. There are not many occasions in my life these days when I find myself among the younger demographic at a social event.
The average Port Fairy attendee was a 50 year old school teacher from Melbourne’s inner eastern suburbs who reads the Age, likes the cricket, makes his own beer and spends a lot of time in his shed. And his wife would do the same; if she wasn’t so busy knitting.
But after you get over the shock of attending an event that you suspect your Dad would love, you actually start to enjoy yourself. This was my first festival in Australia and while I wouldn’t judge them all on an event that had as many Zimmer frames as there are ecstasy tablets at other concerts, I am ready to state that Australian festivals are very different to anything I experienced in Ireland.
And the main difference is drink. Irish people seem to think that if they are in a large field with other people, then it’s obligatory to drink. I think this is caused by the climate which allows so few opportunities to do anything outdoors, that when they do arise, a celebration brew is called for. I can’t remember being sober at any Irish outdoor concert, going back to the time I saw U2 in Croke Park in 1987 and we decided to have a drink in every pub from Grafton Street to the concert venue. I think we were trying to recreate Bloomsday, or maybe we were just young and stupid.
The last outdoor concert I saw in Ireland was Meatloaf (don’t ask, I’m so shallow sometimes you could paddle in me). I went with my sister and we spent 90% of the day queuing for the bar or the toilet as though we were taking part in an experiment to prove that Man is a simple organism, whose main purpose is to convert beer into urine.
Australian folk festivals are not run by Quakers, but alcohol is not seen as the be all and end all. It was available, but in a place that was separated from the music. Maybe I’m getting old (grey beard is on the way) but for the first time in my life, the music seemed more important to me.
And what fine music it was. I should put on record that I’ve been a folkie since the days when my mates discovered Duran Duran and Wham. Any intelligent person, cursed to grow up in the 1980’s like I was would have made the same choice. Back then of course, I thought that we Irish had a monopoly on solo male performers with grey beards and songs about 19th Century sailors. How wrong I was. We are not the sole custodians of folk music. We’re just the best in the world at it.
I have to tip my hat to some of the non Irish however. Chris Smither was amazing, as was Kim Richie and Eilen Jewell. I also want to put on record (so I can look back smugly in years to come) that Kim Churchill will be the biggest thing in Australia within a year or two.
But my final word should go to the Sawdoctors. They must have been surprised to find themselves playing to a mainly sober audience. But they got the only standing ovation of the weekend from the folkie chair seated crowd. Ken may not have approved, but folk means local and you can’t get any more local than their song about a road in Galway. I sat beside a local guy at their concert, whose family, like many in this part of Western Victoria, had moved from Ireland at the end of the 19th Century. His accent was aussie, but his pasty skin and red hair were 100% Irish. As the Sawdoctors closed their show, I looked across and saw him singing along with tears rolling down his ruddy cheeks.
Oh, I wish I was on that N17
Stone Walls and the grass is green.
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