KENDAL CALLING is a true northern festival and it blew my mind. No it really did. On the final night, when thousands upon thousands packed out a natural amphitheatre beneath a Sunday sunset to watch Noel Gallagher and his High Flying Birds on the main stage – I’d never felt anything like it.
I knew I’d been somewhere and lived a little.
Being in a throng of music lovers is like an overwhelming dreamlike reverence and joy I’ve never experienced before in my life. It was the pinnacle of a great weekend festival – the final musical showdown beneath a blue-black sky.
I can’t and shouldn’t say less and I was only there for two days.
This finale, Noel Gallagher and the High Flying Birds being the final band on the main stage of the final night, for me, was like being in the middle of a human love storm of music washing into you instead of on you from clouds above. No, I wasn’t on anything. That’s just how it felt in all that humanity with all those faces and all that happiness.
To see one of your northern heroes, off a Manchester council estate and onto the big stage, is a big deal for a lot of people and that’s how it is. I was just one of them, off on a weekend away from my usual life of playing guitar, teaching guitar, organising and playing local gigs. I had no expectations except just to relax and hang out.
You’ll have to work out for yourself what it really means being a human being sharing a moment with thousands, because I’ve no more clue than you have – I only know what it feels like.
Why a true northern festival?
Well you have to face the snobbery of those who try to ignore us. Try to pretend that the success of ordinary people in the north, people with talent, is irrelevant. In spite of enormous international fame for the likes of the Beatles and Oasis. The millions who have loved their songs.
Here at Kendal Calling was the evidence of mass love of the music of northern cities. Undeniable.
The absence of the 90s Oasis hits “Wonderwall” or a “Slide Away” for your ears is not the point. Noel Gallagher has moved onto this next album with his next band. He wasn’t playing Oasis hits he was playing tracks written for his present band High Flying Birds. Fair play, as far as I’m concerned.
Noel Gallagher says in interviews repeatedly, he’s done his superstar songs in the last century, which is more than most, and he’s not doing too bad these days either – touring the world and all the rest of it. He has the guts and the drive to move on and still succeed but gets rubbished just the same.
The only time I felt closer, more socially connected, to a popstar singing (and Noel Gallagher is a popstar, unfashionable as the term is to the denial of any meritocracy that is the mainstream consumerist message these days) was watching Damon Gough (aka Badly Drawn Boy) singing at Friends of Mind Festival to thousands in 2011.
Once Badly Drawn Boy started to roll out the aggressive angst punctuated with northern swearing on the mic I felt the familiarity from within. He talked about Breightmet in Bolton and I realised I could have easily gone to school with him. I know the self doubt and I know the anger prevalent in our post industrial home and, like many northerners, I’m familiar with the famous old musical remedies. It was like coming home and I’m not alone.
Spending two days at Lowther Deer Park, the setting for Kendal Calling which is not actually in Kendal at all but lies somewhere among the wet green hills off the M6 near to Penrith and the small town of Shap, was a fine way to live out a couple of days. If you don’t know it – drive north towards the Lakes past the big populations of the north west on the holiday route and it’s off Junction 39.
I witnessed a continuous parade of the fabulous and beautiful low fi fashions of real music fans – every one dressed to kill – in jean shorts, green wellingtons, tranny outfits, curly wigs, silver jackets, pink suits, floppy Manc hats, the whole deal of retro looks.
I heard the Scouse, Manc, Geordie, Belfast accents ringing in the air and even overheard snippets of conversation between Prestonians discussing the merits of Deepdale and Ribbleton and places where I’ve lived before.
I remembered all those houses and rented rooms I’ve been in from Leeds to Newcastle to Preston. A street littered with heroin addicts and prostitutes beneath the shadow of a prison wall – a post band split-up home – is one I remember in Ribbleton. Familiar places. 
As a working musician anxious to learn and chill out, my favourite festival activity of the weekend was blissing out to the smaller stages and looking for new bands and new sounds.
I’m a guitarist and songwriter so I wouldn’t be hanging about at the House Party in a guitar free world for long. We’re more likely to be lying on our backs in the sun at Chai Wallah drinking tea or in the woods among the pines sitting on a log. Who wouldn’t?
Dipping in and out of the main stage was still rewarding though. I checked out 80s super hit band the Lightning Seeds’ for one. Songs that waltzed their way round the country back in the day, back then in your ears, came back to haunt me. A welcome memory of happy moments.
Frontman Ian Broudie, I noticed, had the a Gretsch guitar make and the same Bigsby tremolo arm as I have. He really used it in a way that I have never mastered for his self penned glory – he used it in famous hits when we had famous hits in our ears. When the music industry provided what people wanted instead of side lining the north as it does now in our London-Centric business everything.
Suggs, the famous singer with Madness and TV personality, singing out “my girl’s mad at me…” took me back to a teenaged bedroom and hoping and wishing my romantic longings would all come true and the music woud somehow get me away from the world I was in.
The feelings of listening to Ska pop, love sick, melodies came rushing back as a welcome embarrassment as the old 80s favourites showed their long term professional skills on the Saturday night main stage .
Back to 2016, it was the wild dancing in the Riot Jazz marquee to the likes of Abgeko, the frantic sax solos, exuberance and tightly knit improvisations, which raised the spirits.
Full band, melodic pop sounds of Molly Warburton and hooky riffs provided by Liberty Ship in the Woods stage kept me rolling. Although it was a Fleetwood Mac cover which really got the crowd going at one point.
A delightful psychedelic groove from Time for T made Sunday afternoon groovy while lying on my back catching the rays on the grass outside Chai Wallah. Next up, Bristol based (mostly) Sam Green & The Midnight Heist had the tent dancing and smiling to the occasional hoe down and slide guitar.
That made it for me. The unknown bands on the smaller stages with great musicians. The working musicians of 2016.
.
A 70 year old Donanvan proved to be affable and charismatic as ever on the Saturday night after I’d seen Madness.
I once found a bent and twisted vinyl record of Donavan’s in our shed back in the 1970s – Catch The Wind – presumably discarded by my older brothers who cared more for fighting and football than caring about sounds. I’d never actually seen him live. So it felt significant.
Years later, I taught myself, off YouTune probably, how to play Catch The Wind, the original Donavon sixties hit (released as a single in 1965) Donavon the English Dylan, which I’d pull out of my memory at covers gigs now and then.
I was once lucky enough and privileged enough to live a magical experience of playing the same song to a candle lit audience of hostellers on the Isle of Skye during a temporary hebridean power failure. One of those magical moments you can’t forget. So I definitely respect the man who wrote it.
Finally I got to see Donavon play it himself in front of my face at Kendal Calling late last Saturday at the Woods stage under the stars with a cold wind blowing.
Odd really how it works.
The journey, the connections between us all ,the meaning of the words, the love we’re all trying to express and find. That it all comes together sometimes and makes some kind of soothing sense in a world where none of us really have answers, feels like a miracle that makes no sense.
Fuuny thing is. On Saturday morning I awoke after a few hours sleep having sorted out all the equipment mayhem of a low key pub gig the night before. I didn’t really want to go to Kendal Calling at all. My heart was heavier than a lead balloon sinking into a Cumbrian lake.
I felt generally ostracised, alienated, futureless, you know the usual. Lost in the narrow cliques of the suburbs. Trapped. But I knew there was a chance if I got up there I’d find the rest of the world was still out there on the wide planet of life. The chance to live some more.
I dragged myself up the motorway but was forced to stop at a services to park up, shut my eyes and nap in the sun before those eyes closed on me while I was trying to keep them concentrating on the fast lane.
Once I’d had a snooze, a chocolate bar and an Americano, a glance at the Daily Mirror with its ability to present a rare UK world view which isn’t Tory, I knew I was ready for it.
Kendal Calling: I’m glad I made the effort. Awesome.
A special thank to my companion Bob, the bar manger at Escape bar in Clitheroe, for giving me the chance to grab that spare ticket and for being such an easy going weekend festival buddy. Nice one.
afterthemill 