It was a beautiful day, just the sort of day you dream of for an outdoor event. The sun was shining, the birds (and the bands) were singing and, this being Suffolk, a nasty little breeze was doing its best to monopolise the microphones ... again.
And it was Whit Sunday, so of course we were going to wear white.
This was our first proper gig since January, although we'd been singing at the occasional folk night in between, so we decided to keep to well-established numbers rather than trying out the newer ones. Unlike last year, the weather was fantastic — a beautiful early summer day, with blue sky, bright sun and a fresh breeze — and there was a bigger audience as a result.
The concert began with The Larks, who we would have liked to see, but we couldn't get there in time. We did manage to catch the last few numbers from the brilliant Kiss the Mistress though, before taking the stage ourselves. We'd been advised not to use the radio mikes this year, after all the problems with cross-winds, so we compromised by using the fixed mikes but taking them off their stands, which seemed to work quite well — at least it enabled us to do our usual thing of looking at each other as well as at the audience.
The set itself covered all our four main subjects: beer (Glorious Ale), religion (Corpus Christi Carol), politics (The Diggers Song) and things that go bump in the night (The Barghist Coach) — the latter being one of our self-penned numbers. We also sang Mim's song about strawberry picking in Trimley, The Rubies of Suffolk, which always seems to strike a cheerful chord with the audience. I think we sound better unamplified, and we certainly find it easier to sing unamplified, as the foldback distorts the voices and makes it more difficult to pitch the notes; but one of our friends said it was the best he'd ever heard us, so it can't have been all that bad!
After we finished our set, several members of the audience (including me) had great fun bopping about to the foot-tapping sounds of The Bounty Hounds, and then the concert ended with Cruel Folk and their ever-increasing body count. They were just as good as ever and I was very sorry that we had to leave before the end of their set, but grateful to them for slipping "For The Cause" in for me before we went, especially as it wasn't in their planned set. If you haven't seen them yet, make sure you do.
Sophie