Fiddlers Green Festival 2015

Photo by Pete Heywood, Living Tradition Magazine

We've come to the end of a wonderful Fiddlers Green Festival here in Rostrevor - the 29th festival.  Tom and I had our main performance on Friday night and it was really nice gig - we did the first part of the main concert where Seamus Begley received an award for services to traditional music.  The photo above is from it - we didn't get a good one of the two of us unfortunately but I love this one.  Guest performances at festivals are always a bit more nerve inducing than going out and playing our regular full night gigs in folk clubs... But they're also very rewarding and I love being a part of the bigger picture.  We had a really enjoyable set and it was great to see lots of friends in the audience - our folk family from Germany, Scotland, England and Luxembourg.   With that out of the way and all my other gigs sorted from earlier in the week, the rest of the weekend was for playing and catching up with friends and visitors - in fact the last of them only left yesterday morning.

A few personal favourites from the week 

For me as an audient the highlight has been seeing a young Dublin songwriter called Declan O'Rourke.  I'm not sure that his recordings really capture what he's about - this is a video from the Transatlantic Sessions back in 2011.  I love this song "Time Machine" ..  we can never have enough friends.

His voice is superb - you can easily imagine it on a film sound track and he has a wonderful stage presence.  His most well known song is Galileo which has been covered by quite a few singers already.

On Wednesday night Kila were top of the bill - they have recently performed the soundtrack for the new children's animated movie - Song of the Sea - which everyone here is raving about …  Here's the trailer for the US launch of it.

Kila are essentially a folk rock band - mixing African, Indian and Celtic rhythms and tunes.  They're utterly brilliant in my opinion but they were far too loud for our small hall - my ears were still ringing two days later.
Here they are live at Dublin venue several years ago - this is one of their quieter numbers :)  But I'd love to see them at a big outdoor event - I think they show up regularly at Glastonbury.

Fiddlers Green is a wonderful mixture of outdoor ceilidhs, pub sessions, events up the mountain and on the water, a Duck Derby of course :), lots of childrens' events, art exhibitions - this year featuring Kingerlee and the photographer Minihan as well as many amateur art events, pop up cafes, 3 concerts a day, poetry readings and barely time to sit down and have a chat with all the visitors that come in - old friends from around the world and new friends waiting to be made... It's a wonderful event - I thoroughly enjoyed it and now it's time for a rest :)