MUSIC: THE BIG TENT (Falkland, Fife, 23-25 July 2010)
Rosanne Cash.
MUSIC: THE BIG TENT (Falkland, Fife, 23-25 July 2010)
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29 July 2010
SUE WILSON engages with the issues and the music LAUNCHED in 2006 as “Scotland's festival of stewardship” – a multifaceted concept encompassing conservation, sustainability, environmental politics and international development – The Big Tent was originally prompted in part by the previous year's G8 summit at Gleneagles, to provide an annual networking forum, shop-window and celebratory gathering for anyone engaged with these issues. The great thing is, with its name being a kind of progressive contemporary synonym for “broad church”, simply attending the festival – even if, as with much of the audience, it's primarily for the music and the lavish children's entertainment – is in itself an entirely painless, highly pleasurable form of such engagement.
All of the food, drink and other merchandise on sale is locally sourced, craft produced, organic and/or fair trade, all the bins are staffed by volunteers helping you sort your rubbish, and you can't help but admire the abundance of beautiful woodcraft on display, or perceive its part-and-parcel relationship to the beautiful surrounding woodland.
The music programme's emphasis towards contemporary folk-based bands, from both Scotland and overseas, is likewise integral to the stewardship vision (finding new contexts for old traditions), while the festival's diverse highlighting of local, grassroots initiatives – from the Fife Diet to green electricity on Eigg – extended naturally into a Friday-night bill comprised entirely of Fife-based or Fife-born acts, culminating in a triumphant yet warmly intimate performance from Fence Collective head honcho King Creosote.
There's also the wholly laudable matter of the event's all-round accessibility, including its geographic handiness for much of central Scotland's population, its nearby public transport links – completed by free shuttle buses, and complemented by free strawberries if you travelled that way - and its bargain ticket prices, with free admission for under-12s.
On its fifth outing, it actually occupied over a dozen variously-sized tents, scenically dotted around a new, larger parkland site adjacent to the conservation village of Falkland, complete with imposing Victorian mansion as a backdrop to the main stage. As well as marquees devoted to music, eating, drinking, kids and crafts, several jointly provided the platform for a packed programme of talks, debates, workshops and panel discussions, on subjects ranging from food security to the ecology of play, transition towns to alternative technology.
While a majority of the crowd – numbering over 10,000 in total: the biggest Big Tent yet – was certainly more interested in soaking up the entertainment and the prevailing sunshine, there's equally no denying that the event has succeeded in its goal of establishing an environmental festival that includes an excellent music programme, rather than a “greenwashed” music festival.
This year's most prominent emblem of those twin artistic and ideological objectives was Sunday's headline appearance by Rosanne Cash, she of the iconic US country music dynasty – reputedly seeded 400 years ago by a Fife-born Pilgrim Father – whose ancestral lands lie about a mile from the festival site.
The Big Tent connection, it turns out, is even closer than that, with Johnny Cash himself having first learned of those ancestral lands, back in the 1970s, from a chance encounter on a transatlantic flight with Ninian Stuart's father – Stuart being a co-founder of the Falkland Centre for Stewardship, the charity which organises the festival.
And while Ms Cash got a bit gushy as to how comprehensively spiritual she was finding the whole experience, her choice of material – drawn largely from a list of “100 essential country songs” bequeathed by her father when she was 18 – chimed resonantly with the occasion's back-to-roots, trans-generational, cyclical themes, as her mellow, fetchingly melancholic delivery did with the golden early-evening sunshine.
Flying the Highland flag were the fiddle-led powerhouse Session A9, whose storming performance after the festival's only rainy interlude on Saturday elicited a massed Celtic counterpart to the energetic gumboot dancing of music/theatre troupe Grassroots Zimbabwe, another popular hit with all the family throughout the weekend.
Blowing in from Orkney to close the main stage on Sunday, The Chair's exhilarating gale-force sound echoed magnificently off the Lomond Hills, and while their set was frustratingly squeezed between late-running earlier acts and the final curfew, it offered several tempting foretastes of their forthcoming second album.
Warming up in style for their Edinburgh Fringe run – having recovered from their World Cup chagrin – were the spectacular Brazil! Brazil! Ensemble, who kept springing up and magnetising crowds all round the site with their brilliantly dynamic, gravity-defying fusion of samba music, capoeira, carnival dance and freestyle football.
The strength and breadth of the home team, meanwhile, (in musical terms at least) could hardly have been better exemplified by dramatically contrasting performances from alt-classical combo Mr McFall's Chamber, showcasing their rich, sultry store of tango and other Latin music; the splendidly genre-defying Hidden Orchestra, formerly the Joe Acheson Quartet, with their massive orchestral sweep and razor sharp grooves, and the new Aberfeldy line-up, matching their much-loved melodic jangliness with freshly alluring sparkle.
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