Diary Blog – Independence Day.

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Crack out your wellies. Spray Veet down your pants. It’s that time of year peeps. Festival season is upon us, and this year’s season kicked off with a proper belter.

Independence Day was a small but perfectly formed event in an astonishingly beautiful enclave of rural Devon. It was staged in a thatched barn within the grounds of a chocolate box cottage The views were impossibly beautiful, all rolling hills and wooded vallies, think how Turner might have interpreted Middle Earth and you’ll be somewhere close.

The last festival of the season for me last year was Leeds, it was immense. I had to shuffle on stage in front of a couple of thousand drunken punters. My knobbly knees were knocking together like epileptic castanets. I shared a trailer with John Cooper Clarke and got to pester him a bit after the gig. He was graciously tolerant of my obsequious harassment of him, a genuinely lovely man. Unfortunately as the day wore on, ten weeks of sleeplessness and debauchery caught up with me all at once, and by the next morning I was so ill I had to leave the site without my tent. This meant I needed a new one and being hopelessly impractical I decided to invest in a tepee. Its properly massive, you could fit Gigantes extended family in there.

I hitched a lift to Devon with the lovely Emma Harper, guitar wielding vocalist from folk rock combo Ten Ton Tongue. I spent the journey sprawled out in the back of her live-in and was schooled in the tenets of film noir by a flute playing ex law student turned film maker called Tony.

The event was staged by two of Bristol’s finest poets, Mon and Wilf Merttens. You can check out Wilf rockin the poesy here http://www.myspace.com/stanleywilfridmerttens Wilf is also an amazing story teller: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xb5NU5JfjA so if you’re a promoter of that sort o’ thing, why haven’t you booked him yet you silly sausage.

The event had a great vibe, it was funded entirely by donations and served quality grub and locally sourced beer at bargain prices. It was a one stage affair. Early evening I got my hip hop wellie bop on to the beats and rhymes of some of Brizol’s finest spitters in the form of:

Lil Reece http://www.myspace.com/lilrhys

Mc Idle http://www.myspace.com/idlefreshwater

And http://www.myspace.com/mrwoodnote

Other highlights included watching Alabaster DePlume http://www.myspace.com/alabasterdeplume open his set by attacking a chair with a giant axe. Later as the cloudy ale kicked in I pogoed my little socks off with my mate Pete to the strains of wry spoonerism aficionados Burly Chassis http://www.myspace.com/burlychassislive

I was on at around midnight, it was a bit nerve racking being the only spoken word act in amongst all that music, but once I was up on stage I had a blast. The crowd where well up for it, top gig.

The sun shone strong the following day, but it had been a sleepless night so I was infinitely grateful to lightening fingered troubadour John Fairhurst: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcJbj-A2JXg for ferrying my derelict bones back to Bristol that evening. A bucket of green tea, an episode of Breaking Bad and a twelve hour hibernation capped off a great weekend.

All in all it was a superb event; I hope it’s the first of many.

On to Wychwood festival this weekend, Carol Ann Duffy, Attila the Stock Broker and Tony Walsh are performing too. I’m in the Hawthorn tent on Friday and Sunday night. Come and say hello if you’re about.

Other exciting news, one of my favourite writers Patrick Neate gave me props at the beeb this week.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason/spoken_word.shtml

Me mum’ll be well chuffed.

That’s all for now

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