I've been a bit slack keeping up with the blog lately but it's been pretty
hectic with the band doing lots of rehearsals leading up to Yackandandah festival
plus plenty of gigs in between.
Yackandandah is the first festival we've done with this band, so everyone
was pretty excited about it. It was a 4 hour drive to get there which is a
bit of a pain, but the town is really nice and swells from a couple of hundred
people to a couple of thousand on the festival weekend.
We had 4 gigs to play - Friday night, Saturday lunch, Saturday night and Sunday
lunch - so it was a lot of playing - especially with the evening ones being
the last concert of the night which meant that we played for over an hour at
each of them.
The gigs all went pretty well (apart from a few strange moments where both
the Violinest and me had a memory lapse at the same time) and the crowd seemed
really enjoy what we were doing.
We were also lucky to have a few people along taking video footage and photographs.
Some of the video footage has been
uploaded to the Bizerka website if you'd like to check it out.
All in all, we were pretty happy with how it went and how we played!!
 There
were some other great bands there too, like Faerd who are from the Faroe Islands
(an autonomous region of Denmark) and who play a range of Danish, Swedish and
other Scandanavian music.
As a lover of Swedish Polska's , it was really good to hear them playing
some - a couple of which I recognised from various recordings.
While chatting to them in the bar on Saturday I told them how great
it was to hear some Polska's. They laughed and said it was funny though how
people got up and tried to dance and had great difficulty because the pieces
are in 3/4. I replied that they should see people try and dance to the 11/8
pieces we did :-) Australians are just not used to anything but a straight
4/4!!!
If you're interested, you can hear
some of Faerd's music at their website.
 Another
interesting band we heard was Rachel Unthank and the Winterset. They're from
North-East England and performed a mix of quite modern "tone poem" like music
along with traditional English music - with a bit of clog dancing thrown in
for good measure!
Their accents may have a very strong Geordie twang, but their voices were
pretty amazing and you can definitely hear the influence musicians like Eliza
Carthy and June Tabor have had on them.
My favorite song of theirs had a nice lilt and a chorus of "I will go down
to the pier" as well as snippets of lyrics I remember from a Steeleye Span
song about them "coming to take the laddies away".
Like any festival - I slept very soundly after I was back in my own bed (and
at a sensible hour instead of 4:30am).
Today we're off on a 3 1/2 hour drive to play 1 set for the Harmony Day celebrations
- it's a long drive for 1 set, but should be good fun. And tomorrow we're doing
another set for a similar event - but at least it's only 30 minutes drive away!
Busy, busy, busy. |
