A Shirt on Sunday: Fairport's Cropredy Convention 13-15/8/2009
One of my favourite Cropredy shirts, for the detail in the image leading from the bar in the bottom left, across the field and the food stalls to the camping, the canal boats and into the village with the two pubs – The Brasenose and The Red Lion, whose clientele always spread into the churchyard and finally out to the railway line. It’s a great image, and like most t-shirts uncredited.
What do I remember about Cropredy 2009? Not a lot, it seems. I blame the beer…
Steve Winwood. We’d seen Steve a couple of times in 2003 when he was supporting The Dead on their reunion tour. He’d played a couple of blinders. But at Cropredy we were disappointed. He didn’t seem to be pushing himself and it all felt a bit ‘by numbers’.
I don’t remember the Buzzcocks’ set, unfortunately. I was hoping to have something to say, given that Pete Shelly died this week. There’s a vague impression of men in black shirts bouncing around the stage, and me enjoying the music, but that could be anybody. The other acts on the Friday I don’t recall either. Phil Cool was a folky before he was a TV comedian.
The Friday was my first exposure to Colvin Quarmby. Gerry Colvin is a lovely hyperactive bloke with a bizarre sense of humour and a couple of solid gold weepies. Always good value but never seems to rise above afternoon billing.
Ade Edmondson and The Bad Shepherds. Yes, that Ade Edmondson, performing folkesque versions of punk songs. One of the interesting by-products of this is you can finally hear the words properly. The Jams’ ‘Down in The Tube Station at Midnight’ becomes downright disturbing in this light. A cracking band that lasted about 5 years then faded away.
I also remember little of Richard Thompson’s set. Great set-list, but I have no recollection of the event.
Seth Lakeman finished the night. I’ve never been a big fan, and the sound was dreadful, so after a few songs we headed for the tent. The next day there mutterings in the food queues about the sound being sabotaged and “you don’t want to upset the organisers here”. Sounds unlikely to me.
Saturday started with Richard Digance. This is right and proper, and morris-dancing was committed.
Churchfitters are ‘wacky’. They tell you this. That’s never a good sign. Homemade instruments that sounded homemade, and no decent songs to play on them.
I don’t get Feast of Fiddles – umpteen fiddle payers on a stage don’t really do it for me. But then neither do Dreadzone, being dancey-reggae-dub-whatever. They came back a few years later and I enjoyed them more, but this first exposure left me cold.
Nik Kershaw was surprisingly enjoyable as these 80’s stars always are. He played guitar and bounced around the stage singing the hits. Job done! Ralph McTell did his thing, and did it well as always. He came back during the Fairport set, so we got all the hits and more.
Fairport is as Fairport does. This particular year they’d written a song in praise of the ukulele, and encouraged the audience to bring their ukes and play along. Many of us did, much to the disgust of the bloke sitting behind me on the hill. Thus I made sure to wave it around and generally play silly-buggers as much as possible. But not actually strum it – I’m not a total monster! I did strum along to the song itself and the combined effect of hundreds of ukuleles playing across the hillside, all in their own slightly-off tuning, rhythm and arrangement was really quite dreadful.
The big moment of the night, though, was Yusuf Islam, the musician formerly known as Cat Stevens. It was great to see him in the flesh, but they played five songs, of which I knew only ‘Peace Train’.
So a mixed festival, which I know I enjoyed, as I was very saddened to miss the next three years due to the American adventure. But that’s next year’s shirts…