Life is just a bowl of All-Bran…

The Guardian Online (link to follow) had an enquiry in Ask Jack about a PDA with a good keyboard. It would seem, from the reply, that there is still no good substitute for a Psion Series 5. Just to show how long they have been around, I got my first in 1999, and I now have two 5s and one 5mx.

It’s the 5mx I’m using now in the middle of a field in Cropredy. It amazes me that there is still nothing to touch it after all these years. Handwriting recognition is no-go when you have a scrawl like mine, and besides I still think I can type faster than I can write. For two-fingered dibbing, a Psion is still unparalleled, eight years after they first came out.

Why? One factor is that the keyboard is also a Psion’s biggest weakness. It folds out and the ribbon connector for the screen has a tendency to kink, leading to intermittent faults or total failure of the display. I’ve had to have two repairs for this over the years. One firm reckons to have cracked this problem, and I shall try them out next time.

Surely it’s time for some manufacturer to pick up the baton Psion/Symbian dropped some years ago. An up-to-date PDA with colour screen and a decent keyboard is needed more than ever, now that such devices have finally made the mass market.

Or is there already an alternative I don’t know about?

Richard Digance: did a good job of entertaining. Songs, stories and audience participation. Alas, during his set it started raining, which it did pretty solidly from about 12:30 until past 6.

T & Latouche: two members of Edward II are in this, and they basically did straightahead reggae, both originals and covers (Nightnurse, which E II used to do). Struggled gamely to retain that summery feeling while rain lashed down. We were rather preoccupied with making sure Eleanor was dry and well-entertained, I have to say.

Uiscedwr: Celticky trio. Heard only from afar, as I was trying to entertain Eleanor back at the tent, then both of us retired for a nap!

The Hamsters: no-nonsense rock and blues. Good stuff for a festival, even if it is more than obvious they are…unreconstructed, shall we say? They do lots of Hendrix, quite well.

One thing I failed to get. The guitarist/vocalist broke into a Hendrixlite Star Spangled Banner. In 1967 at Woodstock this was both a statement about Vietnam and a call to patriotism that resonated with the times. What does it mean in 2005 in rural England?? If it’s anti-Iraq war…but I don’t think they’re that kind of band. I think the guy just wants to show he can do Hendrix as well as Jimi himself. I’m always a bit wary when guitarists claim this. Steve Lukather from Toto always seems to be going on about ripping off Hendrix, but he never really captures him, and neither do the Hamsters. Aim for the stars, though, and you may hit the moon.

Beth Nielsen Chapman: again, I was on shift back at the tent with Eleanor. Sounded nice enough. I appreciated the Stevie Wonder cover…”You can feel it all over” is in the chorus, but the title escapes me.

Fairport Convention: again, only saw bits due to being on shift with E. Interesting how they feel they can’t do some songs without Maart Alcock. Red & Gold, Wat Tyler, Jewel in the Crown all got an outing while he was on stage. They just don’t <i>rock</i> without him or someone similar onstage. Swarb made an appearance…I can hear Richard Thompson doing his latest, Let It Blow, as I type.

The overall summary of the festival to follow…

Big Eyed Fish: Banbury covers band. Majored on Neil Young & Led Zeppelin. It strikes me as being a brave band that would tackle Black Dog or Cortez the Killer, but they did both really well too. They would be a good night out.

Bob Fox: the compere for today, and a stalwart of the folk scene for many years. Just one man, his guitar, and some songs. V good too.

Stuey Mutch & Henry Nicol: two young guys who did nicey nicey songs. Almost completely passed me by, I’m afraid.

Edwina Hayes: perfectly nice young woman who sang some nice songs. Said “Thank you!” an awful lot in a somewhat higher register than she seems to sing in. Nerves?

Chris While & Julie Matthews: v good indeed. Songwriters in their own rights, and a really excellent double act. Some good songs, veering towards Joni Mitchell territory at times. I really enjoyed the one about Barrow-in-Furness’s throbbing centre of Northern Soul (!) and the school reunion. No titles I’m afraid.

The Muffin Men featuring Jimmy Carl Black: a bunch of musos from Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts (Macca’s Fame school) and other like institutions doing music by Frank Zappa. Tended towards the instrumental in the first part, but thereafter Jimmy Carl Black (former Mothers of Invention drummer & vocalist) sang some of the early stuff, along with a Captain Beefheart track. V impressive musicianship, but JCB made it with gruff Beefheart-style vocals and impressive grooving. I can never decide whether I like Zappa or not. On the evidence of this, maybe I like his stuff as interpreted by the Muffin Men.

The Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain: Six ukelele players, one bass player, singing and performing a wide variety of covers, with comic antics inbetween. What a variety of covers, though. Silver Machine, Le Freak, Wuthering Heights, all really well arranged and showing great musicality as well as humour. Bowie’s Life on Mars? was shown up as being The Thin White Dame’s My Way takeoff, as well as “interpreting” several other tunes too. Fantastic! Must get the album.

Richard & Danny Thompson: It’s RT more than Fairport that attracts me to Cropredy to be honest. Just the two of them, apart from several songs at the end with Christine Collister. Covered the whole back catalogue (no songs he did with Fairport though, that might be left for Saturday?) with immaculate singing and playing. Mind you, he still can’t remember the order of verses to some of his best known songs! Adds to the charm I guess. I always find the slightly shambolic approach more appealing than near inhuman slick musicianship. As ever, he was fantastic. If you don’t know his stuff, start with Rumor and Sigh and work your way out…the earlier and later solo stuff, and the stuff with Linda too, beginning with I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight

The Dylan Project: well, once again we retreated back to the tent for Eleanor’s sake. This band may have half of Fairport in it, but if they will insist on singing songs by The Most Overrated Artist In the World…I could hear it in the tent anyway, and it sounded like covers of Bob Dylan songs. Say no more.

Seems more and more like blogging is what I do when I’m on holiday. Well, so be it.

We are in the village of Cropredy, camping in a field, enjoying the festival Fairport Convention runs every year. When people ask me what it’s like, I tend to tell them it’s a folk festival. Although there is a lot of folk music, there are other artists too whose work is either influenced by English folk, or occasionally have nothing to do with it at all.

The first day was yesterday (Thursday 11 August). We arrived here at 11:30, and put the tent up. Eleanor managed to look at books whilst sat in the pram, then some children came and read them to her just as she was really beginning to get fed up. Such is the atmosphere at Cropredy, all very friendly.

First band on, as is traditional here, is a local band. Tickled Pink were very good: a rocking kind of folk that tackled different genres. Traditional songs like the Dirty Black-Leg Miner, which we know from Steeleye Span. The obligatory Richard Thompson cover, Wall of Death. And what is becoming an industry all of its own, the quirky cover of a song in an unexpected style. A thriving branch of this industry is the Kraftwerk cover. They did The Model in a Spanish/country manner. Good band, all told.

Next up were Hilary James & Simon Mayor. They major on mandolin music from classical to the comic. We saw them as part of Fairport’s winter tour this year and they were really excellent. Simon Mayor especially does a nice line in Jake Thackray style maudlin humour. In a festival context I felt they didn’t come across half as well. We were quite a way back from the stage admittedly, but their beautiful and rather delicate music got lost.

Jah Wobble’s English Roots Band. Apart from bits and pieces of PiL, I can’t say I know his stuff very much. He had an excellent drummer, a guitarist, a guy who played a variety of bagpipes, crumhorns, recorders and the like, and two vocalists. They did some traditional songs and quite a few instrumentals in a heavy dub/space rock style. I’d never buy an album full of it, but it grooved. Wobble’s bass playing was thrilling and rib-rattling. Really good stuff.

Headliners were Country Joe McDonald and His Band. In his last ever interview,John Peel said, “My favourite album of that era [the '67 Summer of Love] was – and remains – Country Joe and the Fish’s Electric Music for the Mind and Body.” By the sounds of it, Country Joe he is still in that era and has not really moved on. He talked about being holed up in Haight-Ashbury with Janis Joplin, and sang songs about that era. When Arthur Lee or Brian Wilson do that, it works, but it seems that McDonald still has the same band around him as he had then. No new blood, no new ideas, little sense of having been forced to move on at all. He also spent the first few songs of the set complaining about the levels in his monitors. I wasn’t sad to go early due to a tired daughter.