Ballymaloe, with relish
Boutique festival Another Love Story gently broke the seal on festival season with their day-long Love Is A Stranger in East Cork on Saturday.
If there was ever a way to ease back into festival attendance without too much of a shock to the system, Saturday’s mini-festival at Ballymaloe House, Love Is A Stranger, was the way to do it.
There was no sign of the streaky fake-tan teen fence-hoppers, dodgy geezers dealing pills, 4am tent singalongs and overflowing portaloos of the larger summer bashes at this small, friendly and eminently civilised outing.
The small crowd, often with babies and small children in tow, relished the spring sunshine, chatting and relaxing with friends.
Another Love Story is a boutique festival that usually makes its home at Killyon Manor in Co Meath each August. But for one day only, they upped sticks to East Cork to present this government-funded outing at Ballymaloe House, where the Grainstore has served as a music venue since 2017.
”Big heart, small scale” is Another Love Story’s regular tag line, and the scale at Love Is A Stranger certainly was small. 300 festival-goers were spread over just two rooms, the larger Grainstore, complete with mezzanine, and another loft space devoted to speaking events.
A shed was opened up to show the Ireland v Scotland rugby match. Two food trucks quickly formed queues for hungry punters come evening: more food options would have been welcome, or even advisable. The day ran from 2pm until 12 midnight.
In the Grainstore, most of the musical acts were solo or pairings: only Wicklow folk singer Anna Mieke arrived with full band.
Clare Sands performed solo with loop pedal, guitar and fiddle, rousing the still-assembling audience to join in on the fitting refrain of Ní Neart Go Chur Le Chéile (no strength without unity) and getting her sister Lily up to join her on her rousing new feminist anthem, Awe Na Mná.
We interviewed Clare ahead of her weekend gig here:
Cork Hip Hop producer Jar Jar Jr would have been a crowd-pleaser, with eminently danceable beats and his slick and soulful vocal delivery, at a bigger, slightly more debauched bash. As it was, the crowd was still reserved and more inclined to chat and settle in than dance during his late afternoon slot, and he riffed a little too hard and a little too long on the motivations for his latest work, the “shy self-aware me and the ego in me and trying to find the middle ground.”
“I’m done speaking and it will all be music from this point forward,” he promised the crowd at one point, and then promptly broke his promise.
Folk cult icon Junior Brother had Tony McLoughlin on mandolin and backing vocals on stage with him, adding a welcome musicality in contrast to his own at times purposely jarring style: if ever there’s a man who’s not afraid of the strange sounds that come out of his mouth, it’s Junior Brother.
They started with a trad tune, before lashing into his best-known song, Hungover at Mass. Life’s New Haircut, a song he released in 2021, was mesmerising.
An afternoon of slow-paced speaking events in the second venue space gave way in the evening to DJs.
After dark, but only just, DJ Toby Hatchett was as generous to his dancefloor as the My House DJs always are; My House is an area at Body & Soul festival renowned for its creative, theatrical approach to partying, set to make a return to Body & Soul for 2022 after several years’ absence, we hear.
The Sunday Times DJs kept the dancing going upstairs until midnight.
In the Grainstore, Oregon folk singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Peter Broderick took his shoes off and sang an ode to the blackberry with a blackberry vine hat on his head, before launching into a tale told on an overhead projector he “found on the streets of London and promised to put to good use.”
Broderick’s American Whimsy is Devendra Banhart without the cult, Arlo Guthrie without the dad. With consummate musicianship and a songwriter’s ability to meld the minutiae of modern life to grand themes.
Love was in the air for penultimate musical act Conor O’Brien of Villagers, who brought a pared down ensemble of just himself with acoustic guitar and a keyboard player: he played a selection of songs from his 2021 album, Fever Dreams, and a few oldies, for an attentive, almost reverent audience who started the gig seated but soon took to their feet to sway along.
After Circles in the Firing Line (“that’s the only loud song we have in the whole set, so we just blew our load”) O’Brien got the crowd to join him in singing Wild Mountain Thyme and gave himself a moment to bask, smiling, in the sound of a couple of hundred voices becoming an impromptu choir for him.
Nothing Arrived, from Villagers’ 2013 Awayland album worked particularly well without full band in a pared back, heartfelt arrangement, O’Brien’s voice as sweet and sustaining as ever it is.
Amongst a couple of the inevitable Covid absences to the announced line-up was K3:lu (pronounced Curlew), AKA Pat Hatchett, the West Cork based composer and multi-instrumentalist who launched his own world music inspired K3:lu project last year: Donal Dineen stood in for him with a DJ set in the Grainstore to close out the evening.
Then, all of a sudden, it was home to bed, at midnight on a Saturday night. Hungover at Mass? Not this Sunday.
