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REVIEW FROM www.livingtradition.co.uk
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FOLK
FESTIVAL - A Celebration of Music recorded at the Sidmouth International
Festival Gottdiscs GOTTBOX 011 |
This is a box set
comprising 2 CDs and a handsome 28-page book and billed as 'A Celebration
of Music recorded at the Sidmouth International Festival'. Because the
release coincided with the 50th Anniversary of the Festival, my expectation
was that this would be an in-depth project on Sidmouth with lots of historic
material - in the style of Free Reed's 'Revival Masters'. This is not
the case. Although the book provides a summary of the Sidmouth Festival
over the years, the release appears to aim to be a more general portrayal
of a typical folk festival, using material from Sidmouth as its source.
The 35 tracks spanning the two CDs offer the listener plenty of excellent
material and all but one of the tracks are previously unreleased. The
standard of design is excellent and the set should have a broad appeal
to a wide audience extending far beyond those who have attended Sidmouth
over the years.
The focus of the set is weighted towards 'star names'. There is also a
bias towards meaty songs of social comment with powerful performances
including Ralph McTell's 'Pepper and Tomatoes', Vin Garbutt's ' City of
Angels' and Coope Boyes and Simpson's 'Jerusalem Revisited'. Some artists
contribute more than one track, which some might consider strange considering
the choice available given the breadth of the booking policy at Sidmouth,
but one bonus from this approach is that there are three top quality recordings
from Nic Jones.
I don't have an insight into the amount of material that the compiler,
David Suff, had to choose from but I suspect that he chose strong songs
from a variety of performances and then set about the task of sequencing
them. The end result is more like a 'best of' sampler than the considered
choice of an artist structuring a performance set from a repertoire of
songs. There is little sense of it being a 'live album'. Most of the tracks
sound as if they were recorded through PA systems, giving near studio
quality sound but with little or no audience interaction other than quickly
faded out applause at the end of each track. One track that best captured
one of the more informal and unusual moments that crop up at festivals,
was an unaccompanied version of 'Streets of London' with Ralph McTell
joined by Show of Hands and Chris While & Julie Matthews. This version,
far removed from the normal setting of the song was for me one of the
highlights of the set.
To sum up: an excellent set of recordings presented in a way that projects
a quality image of the Folk Festival. It is not the aural equivalent of
the book on Sidmouth's fifty-year history, but it is a welcome attempt
at telling part of the story.
Pete Heywood
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