Today was Folk by the Oak (it was also the Evans Cycles Wimpole Hall cyclo-sportive, and at various points I was wondering if it was even possible to try both, but a side strain contracted by walking into a pillar and then going for a run earlier in the week put paid to that plan). Like most festivals, it was fun but exhausting; I saw Leveret (meh), This is the Kit (excellent), Kitty Macfarlane (excellent), Shake the Chains (this year's Nancy Kerr-based Folk by the Oak-sponsored collaboration, about protest songs - a lot of fun and also thought-provoking), Eric Bibb (blues singer is bluesy. Not my thing), Show of Hands (excellent as always, the highlight of the day), Kate Rusby (I like her, but she's not really festival music), Sam Kelly and the Lost Boys (looking increasingly like worthy successors to Bellowhead), and the Levellers (oddly flat by their standards, but still damn good and you can't really go wrong by closing out with
What a Beautiful Day and fireworks).
Given that, it would seem sensible to have today's prompt be filled by something I heard today; the prompt is "A song that makes you think about life". There were a fair few of those, for one reason and another - I'd love to answer the prompt with Shake the Chains'
There's More to Building Ships, but I can't, because there's no recording of that song publicly available at the moment (the album comes out in September, it's probably worth a look). Show of Hands opened up with
Cuthroats, Crooks and Conmen which did make me think about things somewhat, but not really topics I'd normally put under the heading of "life". So I ended up here, a song about the value of life and the consequences of taking it:
(unlike at Folk by the Oak, in this video Mark Chadwick didn't have to interrupt his song to tell some idiots who were getting into a fight in the front rows to knock it off, a fact I mention due to the sheer irony involved).
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