By the time we got home at 2 o’clock on Sunday morning, it felt as though we’d been away for a week. My day started early (4am), when I couldn’t sleep any longer due to songs, harmonies and chords rampaging nervously around my head in preparation for the gig we were to play at the Hinx festival, where I was to do a couple of duets with Nellie, our singer; one of the songs we only played for the first time last Tuesday!
Hinx is a small town with a huge festival; there were children’s entertainers, a funfair, and a live band playing for line dancing, amid a myriad of other entertainments. We were to play in the beer festival area; they certainly had an impressive selection of beers, served by bar staff wearing pretend kilts, bright green socks, festival T-shirts and an amazing array of headgear.
We were one of three bands who played half hour shifts in rotation from midday through to midnight; when we’d done everything we know, we started again at the top, running through our repertoire one and a half times by the end of the day. We play mostly Celtic traditional music, with a few bits of folk from elsewhere thrown in; of the other bands, one plays Breton music and one is a group of Frenchmen playing Scottish bagpipes – God only knows why anyone would actually choose to play what is, after all, not so much a musical instrument as an instrument of torture, but each to his own!
As the temperature rose, once again, to the mid-30’s we were very glad to be in the relative cool of the shade next to the bar, with easy access to all the liquid refreshment we could want. Jacques, who runs the band, has an ex-theatre mixing desk, not really suitable for live music and although he has a few volunteers very willing to have a go, none of them actually has a clue how to use it. Fortunately, Adrian and Julie were coming to listen to us; what Ade doesn’t know about sound systems ain’t worth knowing, so between our first and second sets, he transformed the sound from a base-heavy, fuzzy noise to a properly balanced sound where each instrument and voice could be heard. The reproduction on the videos isn’t great, but it will give you an idea of the sort of stuff we do, I hope you enjoy it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kL3rv-3OIk