Music

The Oxford Folk Festival has truly come of age. There have been only four before, but this year’s performances have cemented its reputation as the first great festival in the nation’s calendar of essential musical events. Just as it gets light in the evening, the Oxford Folk Festival comes along to lift your spirits by anticipating a frolicking summer of music.

The festival’s growing reputation is largely attributable to local charismatic new age godfather Tim Healey. He has made the festival become a vital part of the local music scene.  Thirty five acts in all showed that folk music really is for all.

Surprisingly, Friday night was a shade tepid with an unadventurous line up. Festival stalwart crusties 3 Daft Monkeys headlined, but they didn’t really catch fire. Plenty of room at the bar though, maybe it is the recession? The festival is rather modest in its marketing and the venue could indeed have been fuller.

Amongst the local highlights of the weekend were Telling the Bees in the atmospheric Old Library of the Town Hall.  They all look like characters from a Thomas Hardy novel and sound like bucolic minstrels from a bygone pastoral era - it was all very 19th century. There was a whiff of protest about the threesome as they sang with a psychedelic slant. Wilber was simply majestic; he is now a regular at this festival. The boy plays a guitar as well as any man.  Hardcore folk fundamentalists Bellowhead were simply sensational, and their brand of energetic anarchic frenzied folk simply has to be seen to be comprehended or described. 

The festival is a true celebration of our wonderful old dame of a town hall. It is a building we sometimes overlook and take for granted, yet deserves to be celebrated and loved. Village idiots from near and far occupied Broad Street and the Castle grounds on Saturday and Sunday afternoon, bewildering the suave Mediterranean early season tourists with a colourful morris dancing frenzy. There was a sweaty ceilidh in Brookes University, ably orchestrated by the Woodpecker Band who showed there are alternatives to the gym for keeping fit. A high five to all the wonderfully helpful volunteers and stewards whose startling manners and courteous selflessness was a credit to their city as well as their upbringing. Better than the Cambridge Folk Festival.

Unlike the other brasher and drearily commercial folk festival at the other place, our Oxford Folk Festival focuses on local acts, is true to the folk music heritage and marvellously genteel in spirit. England at its best.  And Oxford at its best.