Musicians go where the money is – or, failing that, where the good times are. I’m no different; I’ll play for whoever wants me, which is why I’ve ended up doing musicals, raves and a week-long art installation in an abandoned warehouse. Alongside the Ragamuffins, I’m also part of the Harlequin Dynamite Marching Band – a rag-tag bunch of drummers and brass instruments, a kind of cross between a Tijuana mariachi band and a New Orleans second-line parade, growing almost organically out of the community around MelloMello, the café-cum-venue-cum-artistic hub in Liverpool’s Ropewalks.
Our original singer, Lucy, is also a member of another band, Stealing Sheep – you might have heard of them. We’ve played with them before, on live versions of their songs ‘Shut Eye’ and ‘A Real Clown’, and when they were looking at their festival schedule for the summer they decided to get us involved. The original list of dates got pared down as availability issues got worked out, but it still worked out as seven festivals over the course of the summer; a pretty significant undertaking in anyone’s book. First up, 2000 Trees in Gloucestershire.
Forecasts were predicting the hottest weekend of the year as our brassy cohort assembled outside Mello on Saturday morning. The anticipation was palpable – this was going to be good!
Foolish humans; if only they knew the terrors that awaited them…
Just before midday, less than fifty minutes out from Broad Green, we hit a traffic jam on the M6. We passed Keele Services, five miles to the south, at a quarter to four that afternoon.
If you hadn’t realised it already, three-and-a-half hours being stuck in a crowded minibus on a crowded motorway on the hottest weekend of the hottest July since records began is not a great way to start your summer of festivals. Tempers were stretched; bladders grew distended; the doors were thrown open, only to find that the carriageway gave up only the slightest of breezes, the very mildest of respites from the sweatbox within. The Sheep, travelling via the back roads, managed to arrive onsite forty minutes ahead of us despite setting off over an hour later.
Needless to say, when we arrived in Gloucestershire our mood was somewhat downcast. Fortunately, the glorious weather and beautiful countryside helped alleviate that, as did the comparative ease of setting up camp. With the sun still shining, and several hours to kill before stage-time, we went our separate ways to explore the campsite.
Assorted Sheep and Harlequins, relaxing prior to performance
2000 Trees is what’s known as a ’boutique’ festival; compact site, a small number of stages, relatively cheap tickets and an emphasis on exclusivity and intimacy. I managed to catch Stornoway’s set – a band I’d always had a soft spot for – getting surprisingly close to the stage, surrounded by an alarming number of seventeen-year-olds who went wild to ‘Zorbing’ and ‘I Saw You Blink’. For all they can be a bit bed-wetter at times, Stornoway have enough good ideas that I went away feeling inspired, little suspecting just how soon I’d get the chance to put my thoughts into practice.
Wandering back up the hill, I found my bandmates already getting into costume and urging me to do the same. I quickly found that this was probably not the weekend to be wearing black trousers, a waistcoat and a cravat whilst marching around a festival site. I also found that, for all its focus on intimacy, 2000 Trees has a small but vocal contingent of drunken buffoons who wander up and start shouting at you to play the Muppets Theme. Still, it was better than the company we’d had on the M6.
As to the gig itself, it went pretty well – especially considering it was our first time out. I’ll go into greater detail of the actual set in the future, as there’s other stuff from this festival to discuss and other festivals which aren’t as interesting.
Post-gig, flushed from exertion, we wandered into the wider campsite from our little enclave by the farmhouse. Plonking ourselves down by one of the busking stages, I ran into a friend of mine from back in Liverpool, a man by the name of James Addis. As it happens, Addis was a veteran of the festival and in charge of running the stage under his Addistock banner. Still energised by Stornoway, and emboldened by the respect I knew Addis had for my own work, I made a cheeky request: any chance I could get up and do a few numbers?
“Mate,” came the response, “find a guitar and you’re up there.”
So I did – and Addis was as good as his word. My bandmates were pretty good too, sticking around through various acts they were patently unimpressed with to watch me. And so the Spoony Bard rode again in the rolling hills of Gloucestershire, with a cappella numbers, new songs and some rather theatrical stage banter. It was a rather magical way to round off what was nearly an awful, awful day.
© Addistock 2013
On the way home, we stopped off in Tewkesbury and went to a Renaissance Fair for lunch. Given the last time I was in Gloucestershire it was to go cheese-rolling, I am now convinced the place exists mostly in the fourteenth century. I have friends from Gloucestershire who assure me that’s far too modern an assessment.
The journey home was, apart from a break at Frankley Services (sadly lacking in photos of either Bill Shankly or Geoff Travis), rather uneventful. We arrived back in Liverpool to a cloud-dotted sky and a cooling breeze, confidence boosted at having our first festival successfully conquered.
We needed it. Next weekend was a monster…
Huyton Couture 