 | | Reviews | | |  DEREK SCHOFIELD (Author)
The First Week In August - Fifty Years Of The Sidmouth Festival
Sidmouth International Festival
ISBN 0-9547502-0-9
Here's a belated review of a summer release to warm the oncoming winter nights with happy memories. One of life's little ironies: this publication, timed to celebrate Sidmouth Festival's 50th anniversary, ended up also marking its demise. When the author started work on the project, the festival's management of 18 years was already struggling against spiralling costs and obstructive bureaucracy. Sidmouth International Festival 2004 was the last of the superbly-orchestrated events by Mrs Casey Music and the future is uncertain. Plans are afoot for some sort of continuance but if the magic is gone, this book goes a long way to preserving the memory of one of folk history's landmarks.
Sidmouth is - or was - an institution far greater than the sum of its parts, to quote a 1994 edition of Folk Roots magazine. It's inspired huge passion among its followers, who return year after year for their week of intense immersion in folk arts and friendship - a passion echoed in the pages here. Documenting the festival's development from a tiny dance-based event in 1955 (some 100 EFDSS members enjoying a "seaside holiday with dancing") to its position as the biggest folk arts festival in Europe, this A4 volume is fascinating reading from page one.
Derek Schofield's long and intimate association with both the festival and the larger British folk scene places him well to author this account. He's achieved a wonderfully rich and affectionate portrait, culled from experience, research and a mountain of contributions and assembled into a year-by-year narrative of facts, anecdotes, memories and photographs, which in telling the tale of the festival also reveals much history of the folk revival. From telling quotes ("Can we avoid all forms of female morris (Winster, Abram)? Tell the girls to leave their sensible hankies at home." - Bert Cleaver, 1963) to shared memories (1997: the year of torrential rain when the river level at the ford rose from its customary three inches to over six feet and the town flooded), it's a beautifully-documented social and cultural history, full of detail from first year to last.
It's all accounted for - the festival's evolution, the staged and impromptu events, the fun and the frolics, and above all the myriad artists and attenders who gave and got so much from a singular annual gathering in a beautiful coastal Devon town. Insightful and entertaining, The First Week In August is more than just a souvenir for Sidmouth-goers, and a real labour of love - with bells on!
Mel McClellan - November 2004
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 My copy of /The First Week In August/ fell apart before I'd finished reading it (a bit like the Working Programme does before the week is out) so I'm really glad I didn't buy it but won it in a competition. I can't help thinking it really would have been a better idea to publish it more professionally in hardback so that those who want that sort of thing would have a lasting memento. How much is it anyway?
A useful aide memoire is the year-by-year summary of current events placed alongside the text which helps conjure up a befuddled recollection people and attitudes you'd completely forgotten about. Or, in many cases, hoped you had. Though they're all now re-emerging from the woodwork in a proliferation of online fora, at each other's throats in a flame-fest about Sidmouth's future (if any).
As Mel rightly says, "... if the magic is gone, this book goes a long way to preserving the memory". If another festival is to rise from the ashes, it has to respect and emulate that memory and to organise that will take time. To try and cobble together at this short notice some kind of pale imitation of what is gone is to kick what was Sidmouth in the teeth.
Diane Easby, London | | | | | | |  |
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Folk & Acoustic
