Music in the Park, as we veteran Suffolk fans still call it (despite
the relatively recent abrogation of the term in favour of Ipswich Music Day's absorption into the
new, exciting - and presumably grant-laden – Ip-Art Festival) kicked off in
1991 as part of a national celebration of music with a show from local band The
Caution Horses, probably performing on the very spot in Christchurch Park where
frontman Andy “Andy’s Ball!” Heasman
used to play footy with a varied collection of us Ippo musicians and other assorted
ne’er-do-wells on Sunday afternoons in the post-Italia ’90 surge in gentrification
of the beautiful game - it certainly looks like the same area from the photos I’ve
seen of great white hopefuls and recently reformed country rockers Buffalo Road
who appear to have performed on a couple of wooden pallets serving as a stage
and with a borrowed home hi fi shipped in as an afterthought for amplification purposes.
Unlike the rest of the country we in Suffolk persevered
with the form in 1992, and the year after, and then the year after that, until the festival became a major
fixture in the East Anglian cultural calendar. Last year’s attendance was estimated
at over 40,000 people, who were entertained by a veritable smorgasbord of bands on over half a dozen bespoke
girder and lighting rig-composed stages, a far cry from the Venue for Ipswich
Campaign-inspired trailer upon which I had the good fortune to be able to
perform a lengthy extemporisation upon The Buzzcocks’ “Why Can’t I Touch It?” with As Is, one of several
appearances I’ve put in over the years*.
With God’s Kitchen I tried to follow The
Dawn Parade’s feather boa-heavy performance of Brit glam pop. On Star Club
duties I loaded the gear straight off the stage into a van so that we
could re-set up at The Milestone just at the bottom of Woodbridge Road and
carry on where we’d left off, in The Picturehouse Big Band we inspired a
frugging teenage moshpit frenzy (I know, at our
ages), The Perfectly Good Guitars’ cod-American hillbilly accents so incensed
one punter that he stomped, not just away from our stage, but all the way out
of the park and off to the pub, and under my own name one year I even compered the early Singer-Songwriter
session on the BBC stage.
Throughout all of this I have gleaned a modicum (a
quantum, one might say) of experience about what goes on in terms of the
organisation and the logistical effort involved. Firstly, since no-one gets
paid and everyone volunteers, the bands themselves tend to be on the receiving
end of the old saw that some people know the cost of everything and the value
of nothing. I have had stage managers order us off on the dot of the scheduled closing time, mid-song
(even though it was them who had spent twenty minutes trying to work out which of
their shoddily-maintained cables was at fault before we could start).
I’ve had
sound engineers give me the thumbs-up and bid me start playing while I was still
holding an unplugged guitar lead forlornly toward them, I’ve had stage monitors
so distorted and badly-mixed that we’ve asked them to be turned off rather than
try and fight against them, and I’ve hauled a fifty watt amplifier half way
across the biggest park in town by hand because of an unfortunate arse/elbow
interface which meant that I’d already lapped the circumference of the grounds
by road three times looking for someone who may have actually attended a
steward’s briefing before putting on his orange fluorescent jacket.
The
requested detailed stage plan and DI box diagrams we sent weeks in advance to bestay some of these
issues may as well have been blueprints for the directions to
Neverland. Once Songs from The Blue House invited the twenty hardy souls who’d
stayed to watch us in the pouring rain into the backstage tent where they could
at least have a cup of tea in the dry and suggested that we might play
acoustically, only for them to be chased out again by an over zealous FOH
manager.
Throughout this, the audience experience has been almost universally
positive so, y’know, it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of the vocal
mix in the foldback occasionally being a little too heavy on the reverb doesn’t
amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. At least I’ve never been phoned
at three in the morning by a stage hire company to be told they’re not coming in
the morning after all, as happened to BBC Radio Suffolk’s Stephen Foster one
year.
Applications for the 2013 event are now open, and
our local media advises that performers successfully applying to be included in
the line up could forseeably follow in the footsteps of Ed Sheeran (tempting, however
in my case I’d probably have to take much shorter strides in order to do so)
although to be honest you only have to walk out of your front door in Suffolk
to be following in Ed Sheeran’s footsteps – the oft-repeated dig that you could
find any number of similarly talented young singer-songwriters at open mic
nights the length and breadth of the country simply by throwing a stick may
well be true but you’d have to go a long way to find many as willing to get off
their fat behinds and put in the hard yards that Sheeran has, which may well be
what’s made the difference betwixt his career trajectory and mine.
I imagine that the organising committee are hoping
to garner some of the cachet that having hosted the The A-Team hitmaker at a previous Music Day brings. Similarly,
last year The Maverick Festival put up some footage of Ed Sheeran performing at
their song writing competition slot the previous Summer (he came third). Having submitted an online application this year on
behalf of Theodore, the band that Mr. Wendell and I performed with a couple of
times last year with Mr. Mickey Trenter, late of Lovejunk and currently of Ippo
punk veterans Red Flag 77 on bass and with Mike Summers from the self-same 1991
Music Day performers Buffalo Road on drums.
A far cry from the early days of when
simply knowing who to know was a passport to inclusion, the entry criteria has
tightened up considerably to the point where cassettes - even CDs - are surplus
to application requirements. To get in these days you need three songs on
Soundcloud and your own website. We don’t actually have the latter, but I did
include this blog in one of the required fields and so if you’re still reading,
designated committee member, we’d love to play, we really would, notwithstanding
all that stuff about the organisation in past years I mentioned earlier.
