I love awards season! This is the time of the year where we all get to look back over the hard work of 2012 and marvel at what we achieved. The prospect of packaging up that hard graft into something that might even get rewarded is even more exciting!
If anything, the awards themselves are the bonus...Instead the real excitement is the chance to look back and celebrate projects where we've devoted so much time and effort, and then build on that retrospective and use it as a springboard for even better endeavours this year!
I am really keen to submit my Fairport Festival documentary for an award. This project taught me so much, built wonderful bridges with some great people, and proved to bequeath a result I was delighted with.
I knew I wanted to produced a doco about Fairport, and I was eager for my best mate and filmmaker Connor Hawkins to direct a short-film to complement what I would produce for the radio. Summarising a whole project is near on impossible...but I'll give you a flavour of our task and let you in on the best bits...
Fairport's Cropredy Convention is a folk-rock festival for 20,000 just outside a small village Oxfordshire, named Cropredy. It is also dubbed the Friendliest Festival Of Them All!..which I would suggest is a good shout, having been there every year with my folks since I was a lil' baba. The documentary I wanted to do constructed itself around the 45th anniversary of Fairport Convention that year, and thus the festival would have an extra special sentiment (with lots of TV docs also in production to celebrate this too!). Combining a look back over the band's illustrious and long history, I wanted to also capture the magic of Cropredy: the people who visit, the fringe festival, even those who come to Cropredy to enjoy the weekend without tickets to the main festival!...this human level of the programme, exploring what the punters take away from Fairport each year, was exactly the kind of anti-corporate job I wanted, opposed to a straight, hard-and-fast look back at a band history.
Initially, I hinged a lot of my pre-prep on interviews that were unlikely to happen! Even in the run-up to the festival I am sure I was a little nervous about filling 52mins of programming time on the local radio station Banbury Sound. When I got some interviews recorded prior to the Festival with key members of the Fairport repertoire I began to feel happier, but nothing could have ignited the project's incendiary like the weekend itself.
Arriving on site on Thursday morning, having spent Wednesday over in Cropredy soaking up the pre-festival vibes at the pubs, we established ourselves in the press area before quickly retreating to our humble Field 2, where our wolfpack of mates have situated ourselves and our quaint camp for years now. It's always been a mission for us to gain access, as it's technically the car parking field and we'd always been backpackers. We always succeeded in blagging our way through, but this year with a car was a piece of cake.
We had until 4pm, when the festival began, to gather some content, so off Connor and I went in our separate directions to hunt for audio and video. We agreed we'd do this the following day too, and I was prepared to sacrifice a few band viewings to capture everything I wanted. After having spoken to the lovely press officers on Thursday morning, I had been amazed to learn that I had been granted interview time with all the members of the Fairport band, and most incredibly, rare facetime with both Dave Swarbrick and Dave Mattacks! Swarb is one of the most accomplished, celebrated folk fiddle players of all time, and DM was with Fairport from near-on the beginning. Their contributions, I hoped, would bolster the credibility of this programme dramatically!
With some great voxes and wild track in the can, I made for the festival field to records some ad libbed 'diary entries': I had decided to keep audio diaries throughout the festival, to then edit together to create a parallel storyline of my festival unravelling. Whether it would work or not, I did not know, but I endeavoured to try it nonetheless!...it was in my storyboard!
The usual antics took place for us fellas, enjoying our 'holiday' festival. A place with such familiarly we could navigate it blindfolded...although don't challenge us to! Rum and beer was drunk, laughs were shared, and we always made it to the bar in the evening to meet our families and more friends to soak up the last few bands of the night.
On the final night, Fairport Convention take to the stage to perform a marathon 3-hr set, this time complete with rare appearances from the aforementioned folk legends. Swarb played his fiddle with such finesse!...amazing to watch! Certainly one of the festival highlights, watching a man I had spoken to only hours before, a thoroughly insightful and switched-on chap. What a pleasure to talk to him. DM, well lets just say he won't take any prisoners. I was 19. I had researched him as thoroughly as possible in the time I had, yet he exposed my patchy knowledge of the early days of Fairport, back in the 60s. I certainly learnt a lot about researching somebody during that chat...but in the end I carried home a decent interview!
With the 3-hr set concluding with their signature farewell anthem 'Meet On The Ledge', we all sway with interlocked arms at the bar and treasured the moment, before retreating backstage to join in the singalong joviality with a different crowd.
When I got back to the edit room, I was amazed and delighted with just how much phenomenal content I now had to play with. Sure I had done some detailed story boarding, but the audio I now had demanded a revised narrative, and I bloody well edited it together whilst wearing a smile.
I knew Connor would have gathered some great footage too, he's a talented cameraman with a keen eye for a photo. We were blessed by the weather, so I was also excited to see his film and package up our endeavours ready to give to Banbury Sound.
I loved that project, who knows if it will receive any recognition at any industry awards...but I do know for certain that my mind races every day to come up with new ideas so I can enjoy that production process once more!
