THE MIRACLE OF CROPREDY with The Spooky Mens Chorale.
All right, it wasn't a miracle, just A Very Unlikely Thing. on our final gig of the UK tour, we found ourselves at Cropredy festival, about to perform to 10,000 or so punters, our biggest crowd ever. The festival staff were lovely, but the the vibe was bemusing: the punters appeared to be somewhat somnambulised, content with slumbering in the sunshine in fold out chairs and reading books whilst a sequence of blues, folk/rock and psychadelic rock bands all seemed to be striving to converge on one very similar groove. We were going to be VERY different.
There are two very big challenges in this situation, one is energetic and one is technical. The technical one is mostly about loudness... how to preserve our choir-like sound whilst generating enough power to sound “big”.
We've been wrestling with this for 23 years and our soundman Rob has ultimately fashioned an elegant solution via paired mics that enable us to get close to those mics whilst still only having 8 inputs. There is only one stage at this festival, and this is a Good Thing.
The energetic problem is that we are so wildly different to anything else on the bill, in almost every way, that we are asking them to undertake a kind of journey with us...a journey that's impossible to describe beforehand, a journey that starts with beefiness, goes through various shades of stupidity, and then invites more profound sensibilities....and we had no idea whether they are willing to come with us.
We had issued the instructions. We had talked through all the songs. We had warmed up, we had done the beginnings of songs. We had ironed our shirts. We had had our end of tour huddle and told each other lovely things. We had been drilled on how close to stand to the mics. We had contemplated parachuting old classics back into the set list and decided, with great wisdom, not to…. to keep being what we are, now.
We had exactly 20 minutes to wait for the previous band’s gear to be struck, get on stage, set the mics and our positions, line check, foldback check, sound check. There was an unnatural calm…. We knew what to do.
Maddy on foldback was brilliant, Rob was utterly heroic for us, sprinting the considerable distance to the sound desk so hard that he couldn’t hear the sound properly for his own panting. the stage clocks were 2 minutes fast. I did sums.
There is just so much, so much, all at the same time. the years, the decades, of slowly coming to understand what journey it really is that we want to take the audience on, what songs really say what we want to say, how and when the deeper songs can find places to drop people deeper. For the guys, the slow epiphanies of the subtle crafts of singing, of blending, of not dropping, of honouring the song. The tiny points of humour, demeanour, finishings, startings, rememberings. For me, how I speak to the audience, how I include them, how I keep hold of existing nuggets of stupidity whilst allowing the chance to find new ones. pacing, all the little things I need to remember….and how to respond to what’s actually happening, in the moment.
And then….it’s happening. the very first thing I say is wrong. we sing, it’s strong, mighty, even. there is a throng at the front, but in the gathering gloom it’s hard to tell how far back the vibe is reaching. the jokes start to hit home…we are doing what we do. there is crashing under the stage…I ignore it, Dom runs to get the message to them to shut TFU.
By the time we hit ‘Sweetest Kick” we begin to know that we have the audience with us, because it seems like the whole festival is silent as we breathe between notes. “Jolene” is even better, miraculous in its tenderness, and “Tee Tee Tay Tay” goes off like a bomb. I’m madly calculating, do we have time to do every song? the intros are much crisper than normal, but for “we’ll give it a go” I suddenly see that I have to grasp the bigness, whip up and exhort the crowd like a gospel preacher. I do calculations in my head. do we have time to do all the songs? Will they cut us short? I announce that we have two songs to go, to minimize this possibility....
There is rapid sequential mind tasking. Remember to say that thing. Turn around to the audience. Rhys's mic is too low, adjust it. do this phrase super tenderly. How shall I edit the next intro....? I have only a couple of moments, at the time, to actually drink it in. Is it really happening…? It seems to be. But the evidence of a transformation beyond the front section and into the vast reaches beyond is scant. I can't really hear or see them.
It's when they are baying for an encore that I finally begin to grasp what has happened. We heard them booing the sound crew taking our mics off (so that Richard Thompson could come on), but it was only later that we learnt that the standing ovation went all the way to the back. We were dizzied, we still are. Somewhere deep down, maybe somewhere we always believed that we could take this kind of audience on this kind of journey.... but for me it will always be THE MIRACLE OF CROPREDY.
Stephen Taberner