We had two days at home after the Glossop gig before heading off to Wales ready for the Fishguard Folk Festival. We booked a campsite for the little caravan at Llandow close to Llantrisant Folk Club intending to visit the club and do a couple of numbers, but when we got pitched up we checked the timing and realised we had missed it – it was yesterday! We found a couple of other fairly local folk clubs in an internet search but in the end decided to stay put and have a practice and an early night after the long drive.
The next morning we set off for Fishguard, taking it in turns to do the driving again and arrived at the campsite, Tregroes quite early. It’s our third time here and they know us so we sat and had a drink while we waited for a pitch to be allocated (some people had used the wrong pitches). Nice long band practice then headed into town to have a pizza at Ffwrn before our gig. Jim of Mice in a Matchbox was doing the sound for us which is a difficult task in that room – a cavernous space – but he did a good job. We had a very good audience, got applause and a whoop for our attempt at saying ‘good afternoon, Fishguard’ in welsh (prynhawn da, Abergwaun) but we got confused trying to say thank you… at least we tried! It’s a busy, noisy venue with the big pizza ovens at the back of the room behind the bar and lots of big tables of people all chatting, but we had people joining in and following the stories. It’s always sightly disconcerting when people walk out en mass part way through a gig but it’s the way that festival events work when they overlap performances at different venues. Some come, some go.
Lots of good feedback after the gig and we managed to mention our merch. Had a nice long chat with sound man Jim and partner, Sally afterwards. And another long chat with a french couple who had stayed for the whole set and bought our set of 3CDs. We finally got to meet Judy who had been our booking contact all 3 times we’ve performed at the festival – she is retiring this year so it was really good to meet her. The festival booking is a set fee (plus camping) usually for 2 or 3 performances over the weekend – we weren’t going to get in this year but someone had to pull out during the scheduling process so Judy got in touch to say we were in if still available. We’d offered our songwriting sessions as an add on but there was not really anywhere to fit this in.
Read on for gig number 2 of the weekend.
