Kiwifolk.com
Folk and Acoustic Music in New Zealand
Folk and Acoustic Music in New Zealand
John Kirkpatrick hosted the Friday evening Concert in the village hall in Lladinum. Although the Chaps are not guests at this festival (the Second Seed Festival), Karen has given us a leg-in by sharing her spot with us so we can sell a few CDs and promote the upcoming pub gig. This was a hardcore trad concert with some very fine, if somewhat serious, singers and instrumentalists. We couldn't have felt more incongruous in our Hawaiian shirts, Kiwi accents and the only stringed instruments among so many boxes and bellows! Karen gave us a great build-up and in true Chaps fashion, our entrance was totally shambolic but once we were underway we were pleasantly surprised at how well we were received. People applauded wildly and bought no CD's. Ah well, tomorrow is another day.
And so it was. This was the day of our "Severn Suite" performance and we had a 2 hour rehearsal in the hall. John K is a pleasant, dynamic and effective facilitator, delightfully bossy with Milliganesque humour. Everyone lifts their game and he has decided we are ready. We wander around the neighbouring village of Llanidloes and take a meal at the Mount Inn while we wait for performance time.
It's an interesting thing to be part of an experience that you are at the same time observing. This part of Wales could be any part of rural New Zealand as hills and summer pastorale go. Haymaking is underway and the smell of muck-spreading regularly assaults the nostrils. The villages and towns, though, are much more permanent than our rural hamlets. The disproportionately large churches that form the centrepiece of every British and European community, however small, make it somehow impossible for a town to fade away. If we in New Zealand want to save our rural communities and stop urban drift, we clearly need to build much bigger churches. The pubs and post offices will follow.
The Severn River is ostensibly the longest river in Britain and it winds through Llandinum and its neighbours. The Severn Suite is a commissioned work written by Karen Tweed and John Kirkpatrick - about 16 pieces and 12 dances that celebrate the village of Llandinum, its history and people. It's relatively unheard of to get arts funding for this kind of thing so it's a pretty special event. Just how special didn't dawn on me until after the performance when I lifted my head from the partiture and saw the level of emotion on the faces of the few people who witnessed it, they were quite overcome The performance was recorded on two video cameras and the suite will be published as a book. Afterwards, as photos of the participants were taken for posterity, we Kiwis could not help feeling at once privileged and strange to be interloping from the other side of the world into this intensely local celebration. There we will be, in some village or national archive, forever, with no note of explanation.
The next day we featured again in the "and friends" bit of the Karen and Friends concert before we headed over to the pub to play our recently scheduled and final gig in Wales. This too went well and by now we were selling the odd CD. The locals, who had suffered begrudgingly the invasion outsiders whose cars choked the little village and blocked doorways, slowly warmed to us in the pub (hell, they were getting us for free!) and by the end, were almost on speaking terms with the folkies there.
It's been an incredibly happy time in Wales, not least due to the hospitality of our wonderful hostess Esta, a quiet, nature-loving woman who never stopped smiling. We've been enjoying the incredibly warm weather in her countryside house - marred only by the infernal RAF cowboys flying low and supersonic over the area. Wales, as all the locals will tell you, gets all the crap so that England can live in peace and quiet. The Welsh are still as long-suffering as ever they were.
We all agreed, within half an hour of leaving, that we felt a little homesick for that tiny kitchen where we spent so many hours. But for now it's on to London for our flight back to Denmark.
The Chaps are Hyram Ballard, John Dodd, Marcus Turner and Mike Moroney (the author of these pages), an acoustic string band featuring original songs and odd material from last century. Find out more about The Chaps here and listen to some of their music on their MySpace site here
