Festival organisers said the event would return in 2026 but people in the city have described this year’s cancellation as “incredibly disappointing”
Music lovers have warned the cancellation of one of the country’s biggest folk festivals this year will be a big blow to the local economy.
The Cambridge Folk Festival has attracted stars like Robert Plant, Joan Baez, James Taylor, Van Morrison and Nick Cave over its 60 year history.
But organisers have announced it will not go ahead this year at Cherry Hinton Hall, though they hope it will return in 2026.
Music promoter Simon Baker said: “It will obviously have an effect on restaurants and hotels and all of those things that rely on the festival for that weekend in July. I couldn’t put a figure on it but it’s a big blow.”
The local music community are also concerned about the effect on musicians starting out on their careers.
The genre is reaching more audiences than ever but two historic events are facing cancellation and scores of others are fighting to stay afloat
On an August evening in the idyllic grounds of a country estate on the border of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, a rising star of folk music, Katherine Priddy, will perform her set at the Towersey village festival. It is the event’s 60th edition and also its last.
Up to 10,000 people attend each year. But after suffering heavy losses since entertainment re-emerged from lockdowns, the Heap family, who run Towersey, have bowed to economic reality. Their festival is among the latest casualties in a crisis threatening the future of gatherings that have been a fixture of the British summer since the Fifties.
“It’s devastating to see Towersey close,” says Priddy, 29. “Ticket-buying habits have not returned to what they were pre-Covid, but this is a wonderful festival in so many ways and its loss is awful for those who have been going for years.”
Thirty miles away, the village of Cropredy in Oxfordshire is the venue for another endangered festival, also in August, the annual reunion of past and present members of the celebrated folk-rock band Fairport Convention.
Towersey and Cropredy are not alone in facing bleak times. The Association of Independent Festivals says more than 40 UK events have been postponed, cancelled or lost altogether this year. Faced with a surge in operating costs, at least 170 have disappeared in five years.
Eliza Carthy, a singer and fiddler and president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, was shocked to learn of Towersey’s closure. “I feel it personally because it was the first festival to give me a solo gig, more than 30 years ago,” she says. “I was absolutely terrified but ended up loving every minute.”
Terry Donahue, Dave Pegg, Dave Mattacks, Dave Swarbrick and Trevor Lucas of Fairport Convention performing in the garden of The Brasenose Arms in Cropredy on July 22, 1973. This event became the precursor for the annual Cropredy Festival
BRIAN COOKE/REDFERNS
Carthy, a member of Britain’s pre-eminent folk dynasty as the daughter of Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, believes folk music is at a crossroads, events folding despite large, loyal followings, while, paradoxically, some observers see a resurgence driven by inventive young musicians pushing at old barriers and embracing other genres.
I love lists. Make them all the time. I will even keep on file other people’s lists if there’s something about them that resonates. One of my favorites is a handwritten list of book titles Ernest Hemingway wrote for Arnold Samuelson, who once hitchhiked from Minnesota to Key West, to ask the writer how he too might become a writer. Hemingway gave him a list of sixteen classic books to read, including novels by Leo Tolstoy and E.E. Cummings.
I still haven’t read War and Peace or The Enormous Room, Mr. Hemingway, but I intend to.
The list below is special, not the least because it signifies a debut, the first voice other than my own to appear here on the Mischief Time Blog. Welcome, raconteur, bon vivant and all around good sport, Dai Bando!
Number two, the piece is in the tradition of those end-of-the-year lists that music fans like myself used to devour in such publications as the New York Times, Village Voice, Newsweek and Rolling Stone.
Lastly, as an artifact, it references an experience which, sadly, is not available to us in the current setting of late 2020 and the COVID-19 Pandemic: listening to live music in concert halls, nightclubs, arts centers, bars, cafes and festivals. May all of it return by the end of 2021.
– Wayne Cresser | Between You and Me
Dai Bando’s TOP 10 LIVE MUSIC EVENTS of 2015
1.Pokey LaFarge / The Sinclair, Cambridge, MA
– A Pokey LaFarge show is like watching Cab Calloway and Jimmie Rogers together onstage, only they’re both Pokey. Add a little Ernest Tubb, and maybe a little Ernest T. Bass, as well. Early in his set of western swing, Storyville jazz, and country blues, Pokey jumped off the stage at The Sinclair and offered me and my pal a communal swig from his bottle of whiskey. Later, he silenced an unfortunate group of local yokels who were shouting “USA, USA!” using only a smirk and a raised eyebrow from under the brim of his fedora. Song of the night? “Cairo, Illinois,” which is the best country song I’ve heard in some time.
Every summer London is awash with music festivals. There are so many that it can be hard to differentiate them and know which is right for you. That’s why we’ve decided to make things a bit easier on you, and sum up each event in a few pithy sentences. Enjoy:
RE-TEXTURED: Could anything be more London in 2019 than an electronic music festival centred around brutalist architecture. That’s not a knock — we couldn’t be more excited to see ear-shattering techno in London’s
